Perez was rivalling Verstappen earlier in the season (inset) but couldn't match him at Silverstone
As of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix a month ago, Sergio Perez was only 4-3 down to Max Verstappen in qualifying, had actually outqualified him in two consecutive races (Monaco and Baku) and the gap between them, at a few hundredths of a second, was the smallest between any team mate pairing on the grid.
Since then, we’ve had two races where Verstappen has been comprehensively faster (albeit thwarted by his debris damage at Silverstone). Probably not coincidentally, the Red Bull has been developed during that time to have a more responsive front end.
The team definitely seems to have taken its development cue from Verstappen. Recall father Jos Verstappen’s somewhat dissatisfied summary of Max’s Monaco weekend, where he felt the team had not served his son particularly well? “We all saw that it was a difficult weekend for him,” he said. “It starts with the car, which simply doesn’t have the characteristics for his driving style yet. Max has far too little grip at the front axle. And especially in Monaco, with all those short corners, you need a car that turns very quickly. That was just hard.”
It was a similar story in Baku, where the somewhat inert front end limited what he could do with the car through the tight old town section. Perez by contrast was relishing the confidence this gave him, loved how the threat of rear instability which had so limited him last year, was gone.
A week later in Canada, the car was running with a visible degree of rake for the first time. It had a sharper front end and right from the start of practice Verstappen was running a much harder pace. In wet qualifying he put it on pole 0.65sec clear of the field. Perez crashed out in Q2.
“Max has found something because he dominated that weekend and with no sign of Sergio looking to be threatening,” Damon Hill commented on the F1 Nation podcast. “They’ve done something. I get the feeling they’ve done something to help him because he’s not the sort of person who would have taken being out-qualified by Sergio lying down. So I think that they’ve tried to work on giving him what he really needs and it could be that they’ve helped the front end of the car. It looked like he got rid of some of that understeer, and it could do him wonders.”
At Silverstone, again in the wet, Verstappen qualified a resounding 0.6sec faster than Perez.
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“I think the development of the car has been… I haven’t been as comfortable with it as I was in the beginning, let’s put it that way,” said Perez here in Austria yesterday. “I think I’ve got some work to do to understand what’s going on and hopefully have a more straightforward weekend here.
“It’s just going away from me in terms of how comfortable I was in the beginning. But saying that, I’ve had only two races of this and last weekend I wasn’t up to it, I was feeling pretty bad, so I think this is the first weekend where I will see, really.”
He seems to be back in the support role Red Bull has always envisioned for him, but which he had briefly transcended. Even with his difficulties he’s more than able to form a great support in a car as competitive as this. But he’s surely yearning to recapture that brief golden period where he could go into a race weekend feeling he could compete even with his team mate. Getting back to that place might be a receding dream. Let’s see.
