Sergio Perez feels Red Bull’s development of its unbeatable RB19 over the course of the season has favoured Max Verstappen and forced him into making the awkward decision to change his driving style.
From a position of strength at the start of the campaign after winning two of the first four grands prix to lie just six points behind Verstappen in the drivers’ standings, Perez has since been a bystander in the Dutch driver’s pursuit of a third F1 championship.
Verstappen heads into his home Dutch Grand Prix this weekend on a roll of eight consecutive victories, knowing another win on Sunday in front of his adoring ‘Orange Army’ will see him equal Sebastian Vettel’s record of nine in a row.
Perez, meanwhile, is now 125 points adrift of Verstappen such has been his demise, insisting that “as the car developed, I struggled a little bit more”.
The Mexican driver added: “Things were not coming naturally anymore, and I had to go very deep on my driving style, adapt to it [the car] quite a bit, and change it [his style] because the car has simply changed.”
Perez concedes that watching Verstappen run away with the title “hasn’t been easy” for him, in particular, given the potential of the car, which his team-mate “has been exploiting”.
“When you don’t really have that feeling, and when you know the car has massive potential, it is not an easy situation to be in as a driver,” remarked Perez.
“Certainly, we have got a great race car. We just have to make sure we utilise it because you never know when you’re going to have a car that is as good as this one [again].”
Perez insists it was “not easy” having to change his driving style, particularly after the success he had enjoyed in Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan where he scored the fifth and sixth wins of his F1 career.
“With the amount of practice we have, you cannot follow one direction or the other, and then you get stuck with it for the rest of the weekend,” said Perez. “So it is not an easy situation for a driver to have.”
Explaining the difference in the car from the start of the season to when it then began to drift away from him, he said: “It is quite complicated.
“It’s just the sharpness, basically, in medium and high speed that I’ve been struggling with, and especially when we’ve had tricky conditions, it took away some of the confidence.
“But I’m okay with it. It’s another challenge for me, so I’m looking forward to that.”
Verstappen is known to favour a sharp, pointy car, whereas Perez prefers more docile machinery, which was more of a trait of the RB19 early on.
Asked by Speedcafe whether he felt Red Bull had, therefore, developed the car to favour Verstappen, there was a wry smile from the 33-year-old before he eventually cleverly answered.
“At the end of the day, the team is trying to make the fastest car,” he said. “Sometimes the development suits one style better than the other. That’s just how it works.”
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