The 2023 Formula 1 season needs Sergio Pérez.
In what is almost certain to be a Red Bull Racing walkover, Pérez is the only driver with the tools to keep at least the drivers title fight interesting against reigning champion Max Verstappen.
The good news is that after four rounds — plus a sprint — only six points separate him from Verstappen in the standings. By definition, albeit with 19 races in the sport’s longest season to go, that makes him a championship challenger.
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“Having three kids at home, I wouldn’t be travelling around the world if I didn’t believe I could be world champion,” Pérez told Sky Sports after winning the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
“I’m fighting for it, but I also know that it’s long, a massive road ahead. I need to keep my head down and just keep delivering.
“Definitely there’s everything to believe that we can do well this year.”
And his Baku victory, coming the afternoon after he won the sprint race, was one of his career-best performances, at least equal to his pole-to-victory romp in Saudi Arabia.
In Jeddah he had the advantage of Verstappen starting deep in the midfield after a qualifying technical failure. He spent the last half of the race defending from his pursuing teammate, but the battle was arguably more of a stalemate, with neither driver appearing to have an edge over the other.
But in Azerbaijan he was undoubtedly the quicker driver in both race sessions. He won comfortably on Saturday, and on Sunday he clearly had better pace than Verstappen before and after the safety car. The caution period put him into the lead, but he was sizing up a pass on the Dutchman beforehand thanks to better managing his tyres in the opening phase of the grand prix.
“A super weekend,” he said. “A weekend that I think we delivered on the pressure massively, because very single session was so critical in this (sprint) format.
“It was really important to be able to deliver when it matters. [Saturday] we executed a perfect short race and [Sunday] once again we executed a tremendous race.
“That first stint to me was the key to my victory”
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It’s not often we can say Verstappen has been fairly beaten over the course of a weekend in terms of pure speed. So what doubts could still possibly exist about Pérez’s title challenge?
“I think he just needs to do it on a normal track now,” Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner said.
“He’s excelled at street circuits. All his victories, certainly for us, have been at street tracks: it’s the second time he won here, he won in Singapore, he won in Monaco, he won in Jeddah.
“He just needs to get going on the proper circuits.”
And he has a point.
PÉREZ’S BIGGEST STRENGTH COULD BE HIS BIGGEST WEAKNESS
Of Pérez’s six career victories, five of them have come on street tracks. The outlier was his 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix win in the final days as a Racing Point driver, which helped seal his move to Red Bull Racing for the following season.
His podium count also disproportionately favours street tracks, with 12 of his 29 podiums coming on public roads. That’s a strike rate of 41 per cent, yet only 27 per cent of his career starts have been on streets.
He’s also Azerbaijan’s most successful driver. Not only is he the only one to have won the grand prix more than once, but he also has comfortably more podium finishes in Baku than any of his rivals, having collected his fifth at the weekend.
The retired Sebastian Vettel is next closest with three, while Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas have two apiece.
“I think generally speaking it’s a track where you require a lot of confidence,” he told Sky Sports. “There are lot of corners, and you see a lot of drivers clipped walls during the race.
“I think it’s all about confidence, building that confidence lap after lap and making sure you’re on top of the car.”
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There’s something about Pérez’s smooth, classical driving style that clicks with street tracks. His gentle throttle and braking control not only works wonders with the tyres, but it means he’s always able to finesse his way between the walls, lap by lap feeling the grip, getting closer to the barriers without risking suddenly stepping over the mark.
That compares to, say, a driver with a more angular cornering approach — hard braking and hard throttle application to rotate the rear and power out — that is more at risk of knocking the rear axle against the wall. It can generate a faster qualifying lap, but it’s higher risk and less sustainable for an entire race.
But at traditional permanent circuits, where there’s more margin for error with wider kerbs and run-off, more aggression pays. A driver who turns up in FP1 and pushes hard from the first minute can progressively dial back the speed to find the limit. Pérez, who builds into a weekend, may be caught short by the time qualifying and the race roll around.
“There’s 19 more races to go and five sprint races, so there’s a huge amount of racing at a whole variance of different circuits to go through,” Horner cautioned. “It could ebb and flow between the two of them.”
Verstappen certainly saw a return to traditional racing as an opening.
“So far this year we have been at tracks which are a bit stop-starty, not the full-on racetracks,” he said. “There are few really fast corners and fast straights out there, which I probably also seem to enjoy a little bit more.”
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PÉREZ IS IN GOLDEN FORM
Notwithstanding the caveats, Pérez is still in sparkling form to start the season — indeed he’s never had such a strong start to an F1 campaign in his life.
A tally of two victories and three podiums from the first four races easily eclipses all his other season launches, and never in his career has he won two races in the space of three rounds. The sprint victory — historically anomalous but encouraging nonetheless — also plays into the trend.
He would’ve had a sweep of podiums too had it not been for the qualifying crash in Australia that forced him into a pit-lane start.
In fact he would’ve had a lot more than just a clean record.
“Without the issues we had in qualifying in Melbourne, we would be leading the championship,” he told Sky Sports.
The difference between the fifth he scored there and the minimum second-place finish his car would’ve been capable of with a representative qualifying performance is eight points —enough for a two-point championship advantage, the first points lead of his career.
You could argue that this is the season for Pérez too. Eight of the year’s 23 races — almost 35 per cent — are at street tracks, the highest percentage in modern grand prix racing.
Three of the next five races are also held on street tracks, meaning six of the first nine grands prix will be held on temporary circuits.
It’s not enough to win the title, but it’s enough to give him an in. Enough for him to generate some pressure as we head towards the middle of the season. Perhaps even enough for him to build a bit of a buffer on Verstappen if things go really well ahead of the European summer, when the Dutchman has been at his strongest in the last two years.
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“Clearly Checo this year has really been on it,” Verstappen acknowledged. “He‘s been really performing well, and that’s great to see. He’s feeling more and more confident in the car, and for the team as well we are really enjoying it.”
Pérez, having earlier this season appeared to self-sensor a social media post proclaiming his title ambitions, was explicit in his objective.
“I want to win the championship as much as Max wants,” he said. “We obviously want to beat each other.”
And Horner — despite his insistence that other teams might still catch up and pose a challenge — is happy to let them decide their differences on the track.
“As it is at the moment they’re free to race,” he said. “They’re both competitive drivers, they both want to win, which is why they’re employed by the team.
“It’s down to what they do on the track.”
Can Pérez really beat Max Verstappen over the course of a season? What he’s been doing on track so far suggests he can; whether he can continue that on-track excellence for 19 more rounds remains to be seen.
