Perez and Red Bull, together from 2021
After a promising start to the championship, in which Sergio Perez had managed to complete three Red Bull doubles in the first four world championship events of 2024, the Mexican had relaunched his quotations as Max Verstappen’s teammate for next season too.
Perez, who turned 34 last January, thus signed a renewal with Red Bull on a two-year basisalthough multiple sources converge in suggesting possible exit clauses for the Anglo-Austrian team in case of unsatisfactory results.
Perez has in fact shown a certain decline in performance already in Imola and Monte Carlo and will be called upon to make a prompt recovery, trying to chase away the ghosts of the long crisis in which he was entangled in the past championship. Behind the scenes, the reconfirmation of the Mexican expert was seen as a sort of new show of strength by Christian Horner – who was pushing for the renewal – compared to that of Helmut Marko, who never had Perez among his favorite drivers.
The reasons for the reconfirmation
In the Montreal paddock, team principal Christian Horner explained the decision as follows: “Checo needs to feel at ease and trust around him. Only in this way can he reach peak performance and for this reason we wanted to silence everything that could have distracted him.”
In recent days though Helmut Markointerviewed by Kleine Zeitungalso suggested other reasons that pushed Red Bull to insist on Perez: “We wanted to ensure continuity for the current driver pairing, as they get along very well. And also Checo is incredibly popular in Latin America and we sell more of his merchandise there than of Verstappen. And when he’s on the day he’s almost unbeatable.”
It is no mystery that the Mexico is one of the flagship markets of the Red Bull company. But not only that: in 2023 Perez was iThe most searched F1 driver on Google both in his country and in neighboring American states, such as California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona (Bet MGM data) – which are home to a large number of residents of Hispanic origin. And all this translates into sponsors, with personal agreements with Claro, Kavak, Telcel and Telmex.
