Sergio Perez has never really done the delusion thing. So when he looks back on his Red Bull stint now, from the outside and with a fresh start at Cadillac, he doesn’t dress it up as a romance that went wrong. He frames it as a job he took with his eyes open — and one where the terms were spelled out almost offensively early.
Perez says Christian Horner’s message, delivered in their very first conversation before Perez joined for 2021, couldn’t have been clearer: Red Bull ran two cars “because they have to”. If they had the option, Perez was told, they’d happily race one. “Everything is for Max,” was the gist. The priority was the championship, and the project was built around Verstappen.
For a driver coming off being dropped by Racing Point at the end of 2020 — despite having taken the team’s only win with that Sakhir Grand Prix drive — it’s a striking way to be welcomed into what was, at the time, the sharpest organisation in the pitlane. But Perez’s point now isn’t that he was shocked. It’s that he accepted the reality immediately.
He described the move as “fantastic” on the High Performance podcast, but that enthusiasm came with the caveat: he knew he was stepping into Verstappen’s world. Red Bull had been moulded around him for years, and Perez says the team didn’t pretend otherwise.
That candour matters, because the story of Perez at Red Bull has too often been told in extremes — either as a loyal lieutenant who did his job, or as a driver who couldn’t live with the pressure. Perez’s version lands somewhere more human: he knew the hierarchy, he didn’t waste energy fighting it politically, and he measured success by what he could extract from the tools he was given.
And to be fair, the results weren’t trivial. Across four seasons alongside Verstappen, Perez won five Grands Prix and played a role in delivering Red Bull’s first-ever 1-2 in the drivers’ championship in 2023. That was the headline, even if the small print was brutal: Perez scored 285 points that year, while Verstappen amassed a staggering 575 and won 19 races to Perez’s two.
Perez doesn’t contest the performance gap — if anything, he leans into the context. Racing Verstappen is hard anywhere, he says, but doing it inside Red Bull is a different kind of problem because the environment is essentially tailored to one driver. “With his team, his people, his surroundings,” as Perez puts it, the baseline difficulty gets amplified.
He’s careful with the wording. He doesn’t claim he was abandoned or sabotaged. He simply describes a set-up where Verstappen had first call on the “engineering, senior engineers, experienced engineers,” and Perez didn’t. The nuance is important: Perez says he felt supported “to a certain point”, and that Horner and Helmut Marko would be genuinely pleased when he won. But he also says the team would openly remind him where the centre of gravity was.
Rather than complain, Perez says he chose to “get on with what I have”. One detail he’s particularly proud of is that he kept the same engineering team for the entire four-year run — something he presents as both a point of stability and a quiet badge of honour in an organisation that doesn’t hesitate to reshuffle if it thinks it can find another tenth.
He also offers a telling observation about how the gap could widen: there were stretches when he felt genuinely “on a par” and capable of taking the fight to Verstappen — until upgrades arrived. Then, Perez says, “the difference would increase quite a bit”.
That’s the sort of comment that will resonate in the paddock because it touches on the unspoken reality of top teams: the car evolves, and the direction of that evolution doesn’t always land neutrally for both sides of the garage. Perez isn’t accusing anyone of wrongdoing; he’s describing a dynamic that exists whenever one driver is the unquestioned reference point.
The final phase of his Red Bull tenure became increasingly messy in public, even after he signed a contract extension announced after the 2024 Monaco Grand Prix. His form dipped at exactly the wrong time — when Red Bull’s rivals were closing in — and the noise around his seat grew louder. Perez ended up seeing out the season, but he says an early off-season agreement was reached for him to depart. He spent 2025 on the sidelines before returning with Cadillac’s new project.
Meanwhile, Red Bull’s revolving door in the second seat has only sharpened the retrospective debate about what Perez’s job was really worth. Since his exit, the team is already onto its third driver: Liam Lawson lasted two race weekends before Yuki Tsunoda stepped in, and Tsunoda has now been replaced by Isack Hadjar for 2026.
Perez, unsurprisingly, believes that sequence proves his point.
“I think I overdelivered in all areas over there,” he said, arguing that only once he left did Red Bull fully appreciate what he’d contributed. He doesn’t pretend it was always pleasant — he admits the end was “very tough”, and paints a picture of a successful team turning inward. When you win too much, he suggests, people “get bored”, start “fighting each other”, and the drama becomes self-generating.
It’s a pointed postscript, not least because it reframes his years at Milton Keynes as something more complex than a simple performance story. Perez is essentially saying: judge the second seat by what it demands, not just by what it produces. In a team openly structured around Verstappen, simply being functional — week in, week out, across seasons — is its own kind of value.
Whether you buy the “overdelivered” claim or not, the broader picture is hard to ignore in 2026: Red Bull has discovered that replacing Perez is easier in theory than it is in practice. And Perez, now removed from the Verstappen orbit, sounds like someone who’s made peace with the bargain he struck — even if he’s still entitled to remind everyone how steep the price really was.
