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OPINION: Baku sent a message about Perez – and about the value of experience

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emailBy Edd Straw | June 14, 2021 3:43 PM ET

Sergio Perez proved to be right on time at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. Pre-season he’d talked about requiring five races to get his eye in after moving to Red Bull, so winning on his sixth outing fulfilled his own prophesy.

The fact Perez won was less important than his performance level and the role he played in the race before teammate Max Verstappen crashed out of the lead after a tire failure. Not only did he follow Verstappen past Lewis Hamilton, but he also kept him at bay both in the pre- and post-red flag phases of the race.

Had Perez not started the two-lap ‘Mini Prix’ after the stoppage on pole position then Hamilton wouldn’t have made the mistake of engaging the ‘brake magic’ mode that led to him going off at the first corner while battling with him.

Perez also showed improved single-lap pace, although the final qualifying results didn’t reflect it. Having been two-tenths off Verstappen in Q1, then setting a near-identical time in Q2, he locked up at Turn 4 on his first Q3 run. With red flags preventing a second attempt, that mistake left him 0.354 seconds off Verstappen and sixth on the grid having gained one place to McLaren driver Lando Norris’s penalty. While this was Perez’s error, the underlying pace was there.

After the race, team principal Christian Horner said Perez was “ahead of expectation”. Perhaps that’s true in terms of taking his first Red Bull victory, but he was signed to deliver at exactly this kind of level, and realistically did need to put in a convincing performance. While he was always going to be given some grace at the start of the season – and other team movers such as Daniel Ricciardo and Sebastian Vettel showing how difficult it is to jump into an unfamiliar car is further evidence of the need to give drivers time – the pressure was always on to get to this level as quickly as possible.

Perez was an unusual signing for Red Bull and a move made reluctantly, simply because he came from outside the company’s driver scheme. Having given Alex Albon every chance to deliver last year, eventually the wise decision was made to bank on Perez’s experience. But the combination of his one-year deal and the fact Red Bull has a genuine shot at winning the world championship for the first time since 2013 means expectations were by definition sky-high. And for Perez personally, this is his big chance.
Perez’s first ‘big team’ gig didn’t work out as he’d hoped, but the lessons learned during his time at McLaren helped shape him into the driver he’s become since. Motorsport Images

Expectation played its part in his predecessors in the seat, Pierre Gasly and Albon, struggling. Both were promoted to one of F1’s top seats very early in their careers and couldn’t make it work, whereas Perez has handled the situation much more capably. That shows the value of experience.

At 31 and with 10 years of racing in F1 heading into this season, he had a foundation neither Gasly nor Albon had; a confidence built on the fact he was a proven F1 driver. That’s been reflected in his attitude, which is that of a driver who knows his own game inside out and has been able to take an approach that both works for him, and that he knows will satisfy the team.

Perez also has his own previous top team experience to draw on. When McLaren signed him from Sauber to replace the Mercedes-bound Lewis Hamilton for 2013, he had only two seasons under his belt and didn’t cover himself in glory. In the first half of the season, his attitude and approach meant there were those in the team who lost confidence in him, which was a key reason for him being dispensed with – along with the rise of Kevin Magnussen, then a McLaren junior.

Perez’s rehabilitation actually started during that 2013 season, with a marked improvement in his approach in the second half of the year. It was too late to save his McLaren drive, but it meant he landed at Force India a battle-hardened driver. Since then, he has continued to improve, emerging as F1’s ‘King of the Midfield’ – a title he disliked, and has now shed – and earning his Red Bull shot.

What stands out about Perez’s approach is that he isn’t falling into the trap of constantly trying to go his own way. He has stuck resolutely to his intention of staying close to Verstappen’s path in terms of set-up and getting the best out of the car. It sounds like an obvious strategy, but so many drivers end up blaming the car for not suiting them when adaptability – a strength of Verstappen’s – is a critical skill for a top grand prix driver. Gasly, in particular, suffered from this mindset and too often spent time chasing impossible set-ups and failing to modify his inputs to match the car.

“First I need to adapt to the car,” said Perez. “We have such a limited track time with these cars this year, with the new rules of testing and also in practice, that everything happens very quick. I have a very strong reference with Max. He is obviously taking 110% of the car. So first I need to get to that level, and then move around. It makes no sense to follow another direction, because I’m just going to get lost.”

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Perez has certainly been rewarded by that approach. While he isn’t blindly following Verstappen, he is using that as the foundation of his set-up and driving while bringing a dash of his own magic – in particular his capacity to deliver seemingly impossible stints of tire management in races – with the net result of being on the brink of establishing himself as a long-term Red Bull driver. He still doesn’t have that contract for 2022, and probably won’t for a while, but on current trajectory, he will.

There is still more to come, of course. Qualifying has always been Perez’s weaker suit and although his Saturday record in F1 is solid enough, ensuring he’s close enough to the front at the start of races is critical to his success this year. Thanks to that Q3 first-run error, he didn’t do that at Baku, but cleared traffic quickly and was right there. Given his strengths as a race driver, we can take it as a given that he will deliver if he’s in the mix with the frontrunners from the start, which is what makes Saturday so vital. He doesn’t need to be at Verstappen’s pace, and won’t be consistently, but he needs to be within the oft-quoted three-tenths. And he can be, as Baku hinted at.

This matters not only because of the need for Perez to score points for Red Bull’s constructors’ championship push, but also for his role in support of Verstappen. While Perez excelled in Azerbaijan, his opposite number at Mercedes struggled. Valtteri Bottas had arguably his worst weekend as a Mercedes driver in terms of performance, finishing 12th and having no impact on the battle at the front. While his performance was clearly an outlier and he can be expected to be back on his usual form at Paul Ricard this weekend, it was an unexpected slump.

During the weekend, Bottas was baffled but the Mercedes team later put it down to his struggles to build temperature in the front tires. Strangely, this had actually been a strength of his relative to Hamilton in the previous event at Monaco.

“At this circuit, one of the difficulties is getting the warm-up of the front tire and need to have real confidence, the walls are really close and if you get it wrong you are going to put it into the wall,” said Mercedes technology director Mike Elliott. “Those two things kind of go together, because if you can go a little bit quicker, if you can get yourself a little bit closer to the wall because you are confident, then you get a bit more heat into the tires.

“If you get more heat into the tires you get a bit more grip and you can go faster, and so you end up with this sort of positive spiral. I think Valtteri just didn’t get to that position. He didn’t find that last little bit of confidence to be in that positive spiral in the same way [as his teammate].”

Prior to Azerbaijan, Bottas had been the more influential of the number two drivers in the title fight. Although he also went missing at Imola before being eliminated after Williams driver George Russell took to the grass and spun into him while challenging for position, he has usually been a factor at the front in other races even if he never had a decisive impact on the title protagonists. But Baku changed that.

The roles Perez and Bottas play could be decisive in the championship battle. That’s not just in terms of taking points off their respective teammates’ title rivals, but also in confounding the strategy options. In Azerbaijan, it was two Red Bulls versus one Mercedes up front. While Hamilton ultimately didn’t have the pace in the car to do much about them, had Bottas also been up there, or if the roles had been reversed with Perez out of the picture, it would have created a different strategic landscape.
Perez’s success at Baku made Bottas’s struggles all the more apparent. Mauger/Motorsport Images

Prior to Baku, Perez had generally been absent from the lead battle. In Spain, in particular, that was a bit problem. Had he been where he should have been – i.e., somewhere in Hamilton’s pitstop window – then Mercedes might not have gambled on the extra pitstop. These are the unseen influences such drivers have on the title fight, and in a season where a few points either way could decide both championships, they could be crucial.

We need to see how the coming races shake out to be sure, but Baku had the feel of a genuine breakthrough for Perez. And given how hard he’s worked to get into this position, he richly deserves the success.

And that success is a reminder to top teams that, much as getting the next big thing in appeals, there’s also a place for experience when it comes to driver selection.