The answer to Red Bull’s glaring problem costing them a title is obvious. He’ll never get the nod

Red Bull Racing is running out of time to find a solution to its Sergio Pérez problem.

It’s a dilemma of the team’s own making. Pérez was brought in as temporary driver fix after the failed promotions of Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon, but the Mexican super sub has endured an unexpected four seasons and is contracted for at least one more.

Already he’s the fifth most tenured Red Bull Racing driver in history, and if he were to make it to the end of 2025, he would move past Daniel Ricciardo and Sebastian Vettel into third.

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But with three races to go in 2024, Pérez would be lucky to make it as far as Christmas with his career still intact.

His troubled season has been well ventilated by now. Despite a competitive start featuring four podiums from the first five grands prix, three of which were second places behind runaway leader teammate Max Verstappen, his form has spiralled parlously downwards ever since.

While Verstappen could romp to his fourth drivers championship with two rounds to spare this weekend, Pérez is marooned in eighth, last of the frontrunning drivers, and desperately unlikely to move any higher.

Sergio Pérez’s vital statistics, rounds 1 to 21

Qualifying result: 9.0 average

Qualifying differential: 6.2 places behind Verstappen

Time differential: 0.493 seconds behind Verstappen

Race result: 7.8 average

Race differential: 5.2 places behind Verstappen

Points: 242 points behind Verstappen (11.5 points per round)

The above numbers include his competitive first five rounds. Realistically the picture has been more dire for most of the season.

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Off the podium since April’s Chinese Grand Prix, his form has been so poor in fact that Red Bull Racing, which won every race but one last year, has slid to third in the constructors championship and is scrambling to make up ground with three rounds to go.

Constructors championship after round 21

1. McLaren: 593 points

2. Ferrari: 557 points

3. Red Bull Racing: 544 points

His paltry points tally almost had him turfed from the car during the mid-season break, only for Red Bull Racing bosses to give him one more chance to rediscover his form at the last minute.

He’s ended three of the seven grands prix since then outside the points, and in the other four he’s finished no higher than sixth.

Understandably the pressure has mounted significantly.

“It’s how the sport is. You have one, two bad races, a lot of negative talk about you and so on,” Pérez told GQ, heroically underestimating the duration of his form slump this season.

“The surrounding talk, the contract talks and so on. It’s just part of the game.”

But with Red Bull Racing now almost openly canvassing its options for alternatives, even Pérez must recognise that his career is at risk.

The only thing working in his favour is the lack of an obvious replacement to take over Formula 1’s most difficult task of being Max Verstappen’s teammate — at least now, so late in the season.

Only a few months ago and the answer to Red Bull Racing’s problems was clear — and very available.

CARLOS SAINZ ‘CANNOT UNDERSTAND’ DECISION TO OVERLOOK HIM

Carlos Sainz was a free agent before the season had even started, having been displaced from Ferrari by Lewis Hamilton’s shock Mercedes defection.

It was rough on the Spaniard, who for there years had given teammate Charles Leclerc a hard run for his money.

Up to the beginning of 2024 he was on average just 0.048 seconds slower than Leclerc in qualifying — no mean feat considering the Monegasque’s renowned single-lap prowess.

In two of their three campaigns they were separated by less than six championship points. Over all three years the gap between them was just 62.5 points. During their time together Leclerc has won six races to Sainz’s four.

That good run continued this year, when so far he’s continued matching Leclerc on all important performance metrics.

Carlos Sainz’s vital statistics, rounds 1 to 21

Qualifying result: 5.8 average

Qualifying differential: 0.65 places behind Leclerc

Time differential: 0.077 seconds behind Leclerc

Race result: 4.9 average

Race differential: 0.83 places behind Leclerc

Points: 63 points behind Leclerc (3.0 points per round)

There was no form reason to replace him. Only the attraction of signing the seven-time champion, the greatest of his generation, forced the issue in what’s since been sold as a major vote of confidence in the Italian team’s direction.

He should have been the prize asset in a driver market that saw more than half the seats spilt, including frontrunning drives at both Mercedes and Red Bull Racing.

But as the months rolled on, it was clear neither had him as a first choice.

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said he set his heart early on young gun Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who has since been confirmed in Hamilton’s vacated seat following an extensive private testing program and a maiden Formula 2 campaign that has gathered momentum.

Red Bull Racing, however, was arguably more surprising in its lack of interest, re-signing Pérez for at least one more year before June’s Canadian Grand Prix.

It was astoundingly early for what was then the dominant championship leader — which could have had its pick of drivers — and came just as Pérez’s form started to slide in much the same way as it had in previous years.

It left Sainz to consider midfield and backmarker teams of limited appeal. After dispensing with the prospect of being saddled with Audi’s long-term project to turn last-placed Sauber into a winner, he picked Williams, where team boss James Vowles sold him with his enthusiasm and dedication.

It’s something with which Sainz has since said he’s “come to peace”, but speaking to Sky Sports, he admitted he still finds the silence form F1’s biggest teams confounding.

“I’m a true believer that if I’m not going there, it’s because life just doesn’t want me to be there — there’s something else coming after that that will actually turn out to be good,” he said.

“It hurt at the time. We all have egos. I have a driver ego, and I couldn’t understand it at the time. I still personally cannot understand certain choices that people have done.”

SAINZ WOULD HAVE BEEN RED BULL RACING’S BEST BET

Given the bind in which Red Bull Racing now finds itself, its decision to re-sign Pérez so long before the mid-season break looks foolishly premature.

Even if it does resolve to replace him with Liam Lawson or Franco Colapinto, it will likely involve a considerable payout, even if the Mexican is thought to have long ago breached his contract conditions by ending the first part of the season more than 100 points adrift of Verstappen, as he’ll comfortably do at the end of the year too.

Releasing Colapinto from his Williams deal also won’t come cheaply, with Williams reportedly demanding US$20 million (A$30.7 million) for his contract.

And there’s no guarantee either young gun will perform to the required standard at Red Bull Racing. Lawson and Colapinto will have entered just 11 and nine races respectively by the end of the year, all of which will have been for solidly midfield teams.

Alex Albon was similarly green but lasted only 18 months. Pierre Gasly had considerably more experience and wilted rapidly. The immensely experienced — albeit also in midfield teams — Pérez has lasted four seasons but is clearly the worse for wear.

But Sainz would have been different.

Though his career trajectory once looked likely to doom him to the legion of journeyman drivers having earlier raced for three teams in four years — and it may yet again after joining Williams — his four seasons at Ferrari have established him as a star capable of fighting at the front.

He’s yet to show signs of bending under pressure, and his cerebral approach to grand prix racing has rescued many points and even victories for Maranello.

He’s also a clear trade-up on Pérez based on their results this season.

Sergio Pérez and Carlos Sainz compared

Qualifying differential: Sainz ahead by 3.2 places

Time differential: Sainz ahead by 0.110 seconds

Race differential: Sainz ahead by 2.9 places

Points: Sainz ahead by 93 points (4.4 points per round)

Bear in mind that the above data compares Pérez in the car that will comfortably win the drivers championship with Sainz in a car that went missing for most of the middle part of the season and has only recently returned to competitiveness.

Most important, however, is that Sainz would have been by far the safest pair of hands to take the reins inside the team if Verstappen were to walk at the end of 2025, as is constantly rumoured, or if he were to decide to quit the sport early, as he’s sometimes suggested he could consider.

Ricciardo had been sized up for that role, but Pérez’s early signature suggested he was discounted early, and the team reneging on promoting him at the mid-season break confirmed he was out of the running.

With the exception of 43-year-old Fernando Alonso, Sainz was the only driver on the market this year with the history and experience to both line-up against Verstappen and take over from him.

And yet the team was firm in its position that he wouldn’t be considered.

SO WHY THE SNUB?

Beyond Red Bull Racing’s commitment — misplaced or otherwise — to Pérez, its disregard for Sainz as a candidate is a position seven years in the making, stemming back to his almost three-year Toro Rosso career in 2015–17.

Max Verstappen was his teammate for just over one of those seasons before his sudden promotion to Red Bull Racing early in 2016.

It was a fraught partnership between two teenagers desperate to make the most of their F1 chance.

“It was his bad luck to get Max as a teammate,” Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko told the Red Bull website. “The atmosphere between the two at AlphaTauri/Toro Rosso was quite toxic.

“In the set-up we had at the time, I couldn’t see a way of keeping him with us, and so he moved to Renault, McLaren and then on to Ferrari.”

With so much water under the bridge, however, Sainz sees no reason for the team to have feared a reunion.

“I think I would get on well with him,” Sainz told Auto Motor und Sport. “At the time we were 16 and 19 years old. We’ve become much more mature now.

“If my relationship with Max is the reason I didn’t end up there, then I say there wouldn’t have been any problems.

“If the decision depended on that alone, then it would simply be wrong. But I’ve already told them that.”

But it’s not just about the drivers. It’s also about the volatile relationship between their fathers.

Jos Verstappen has long wielded his son’s generational talent powerfully within the Red Bull program, and in Marko he’s had a key ally that’s paved the way from F1 debut to top-dog status at Red Bull Racing, where the Dutchman is now at the very centre of the program.

The preference for Verstappen put Sainz in a difficult position made particularly unusual given his father, two-time rally champion Carlos Sainz Sr, is also a Red Bull-backed athlete with his own power base and his own ambitions for his son.

It was a relationship that could never have lasted, and though Sainz Sr is notably less involved in his son’s career now that it’s well established, the damage has been done.

Reuniting the former teammates would be an irritant to the Verstappen camp, installing a more competitive driver who could theoretically decentre the Dutchman inside Red Bull.

Even in recent years, when Verstappen’s status as lead driver has been way beyond doubt, Jos has been unafraid to vocally and publicly argue against things he perceives to have disadvantaged his son in even minor ways, from strategy decisions to qualifying run plans — quite apart from his interventions directly against Horner earlier this year.

Given Verstappen’s sometimes open threats to quit the team — and the team’s lack of preparedness for a future without him — keeping him and his management happy is a clear priority.

And then there’s the fact Marko — apart from his Verstappen boosterism — is committed to seeing his junior talent pipeline restored to full flow. It’s the reason he was sceptical of Ricciardo joining RB, and it’s the reason he’s now pushing for Lawson to replace Pérez.

It’s all combined to lock Sainz out of a frontrunning seat he deserves — and to earn Pérez a longer stay than his form warrants.

It also means that with just three races remaining, Red Bull Racing still has no obvious answer to its long-term driver dilemma, even though it had Sainz staring it in the face for months before allowing him to slip away.