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Going up against Max Verstappen in the same team has never been easy, and the five Formula 1 drivers who have shared a garage with him emerged with varying degrees of remaining credibility.
All were pushed to the limit of their abilities by a driver who has made Red Bull his own and destroyed some of his stablemates, like so many of F1’s greatest drivers.
So now Red Bull’s decided not to drop Sergio Perez in the summer break at least, where does he rank among Verstappen’s five F1 team-mates so far?
We're ranking the drivers based solely on their time as Verstappen's team-mate and how they compared to the Dutchman over that span.
5 Pierre Gasly (2019)
Daniel Ricciardo’s shock exit for Renault at the end of 2018 left Red Bull needing to fill a void alongside Verstappen for the first time since his promotion to the senior team.
Pierre Gasly had thoroughly beaten Brendon Hartley over their season and a bit at Toro Rosso so was the only realistic in-house choice.
But things quickly went awry with two crashes in pre-season testing putting him on rocky foundations.
Gasly was an average of 0.529 seconds slower than Verstappen in qualifying and never finished higher than fourth in a car that Verstappen won two races with in the 12 races before Gasly was demoted back to Toro Rosso.
It wasn’t just his fairly dismal off-track record that counts against him either as Gasly frustrated the the team with how he worked technically. Gasly seemed to focus set-up changes on specific corners rather than making something work for the whole track. And he also pushed for constant changes, even repeatedly having his seat remade.
Gasly was never a threat to Verstappen, only finishing ahead of him once at Silverstone after Sebastian Vettel collided with Verstappen.
He did at least rebuild his reputation once demoted back to Red Bull’s junior team, but his F1 career was very nearly completely derailed by his disastrous half-season alongside Verstappen.
4 Alex Albon (2019-20)
Alex Albon swapped places with Gasly for the second half of 2019 after just 12 races in F1 with Toro Rosso, having compared well there to known quantity Daniil Kvyat (who Verstappen had replaced at Red Bull three years earlier).
Expectations were lower given Albon was taking over the RB15 mid-season, but he made a solid enough start - most notably, cruelly missing out on a maiden podium finish in Brazil via a rare mistake from Lewis Hamilton - and did enough to retain his seat for 2020.
Albon had another podium-losing shunt with Hamilton in the Austrian season-opener in that COVID-delayed season but more worrying was the deficit to Verstappen.
Every apparent Albon breakthrough was followed by a setback and the qualifying gap to Verstappen actually increased over the season, having already started at over six tenths adrift on average in the first seven events.
The unpredictability of the RB16 - still one year away from becoming a championship challenger - didn't help, but there's no doubt that Albon wasn't able to deal with the corner-entry instability as well as he needed to retain his seat.
Much like Gasly, Albon had a solid enough final race for Red Bull in Abu Dhabi - only 20 seconds off winner Verstappen and on the back of Hamilton for third.
But it was too little too late as Red Bull sidelined Albon, and with two ex-Red Bull drivers in Toro Rosso, it looked outside its own family for the first time in 12 years for Verstappen’s fifth team-mate.
3 Sergio Perez (2021-)
Perez has reached peaks that Gasly and Albon never got anywhere near during his three and a half seasons as Verstappen’s team-mate so far - and that’s not just because Perez has had more competitive Red Bulls at his disposal.
Those peaks include outqualifying Verstappen in only their second weekend together at Imola, playing the ultimate team game in Abu Dhabi to help Verstappen to his first title, winning in Monaco and Singapore in 2022, beating Verstappen to two of the first four wins in 2023 and completing three Red Bull 1-2s in 2024’s opening four rounds.
Perez would have a strong case for being ranked in the top two based on that handful of highlights. The problem has been those have been (increasingly) punctuated by slumps where Perez makes very little contribution.
There’s been a common trend of starting a season strongly before getting lost during the middle of the year, usually because he’s not able to adapt as well to the characteristic changes that upgrades bring or stay in a window where he can regularly replicate what Verstappen’s able to do with the car.
Unlike every other driver on this list, Perez still has time to alter his ranking but 2024 so far has been a frustrating embodiment of his time alongside Verstappen.
2 Daniel Ricciardo (2016-18)
There’s one place between them in the ranking but there’s quite a gulf between the top two and the rest of the drivers on this list.
Ricciardo was Verstappen’s first Red Bull team-mate and provided by far the biggest competition of the quartet.
That was in part due to Ricciardo having seen off Red Bull’s original homemade F1 superstar Vettel so he was the established driver when they became team-mates at the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix.
Verstappen beat him first time out to take his maiden grand prix win but that was aided by an ultimately superior two-stop strategy.
Ricciardo was a good match for Verstappen for much of their first two years together and was the outright standout driver of the 2016 season. But by the time Verstappen overcame his early-2018 incident streak, he had pulled ahead and become Red Bull’s spearhead before Ricciardo made his shock exit to Renault.
Ricciardo’s feeling that the team was beginning to coalesce around Verstappen played a part in him walking away, but he still left with a respectable intra-team record - one Red Bull would desperately take from its second car now.
Ricciardo was classified ahead in 38% of their races together, he qualified ahead 40.4% of the time and spent 34.7% of racing laps ahead.
Even if that was up against a lesser-formed Verstappen, that only looks all the more impressive in retrospect considering what Verstappen has achieved since.
1 Carlos Sainz (2015-16)
Verstappen’s first team-mate in F1 still ranks as the toughest he faced.
Carlos Sainz and Verstappen came into F1 and Toro Rosso together as rookies in 2015 but they entered with very different backgrounds.
Verstappen was naturally the favoured son, courted by Red Bull’s special advisor Helmut Marko, and snagged from under the clutches of Mercedes, something team boss Toto Wolff still regrets to this day.
Sainz had to take a longer route to F1 but once he got there he proved to be an impressive match for Verstappen from the off, arguably providing a stronger challenge than Verstappen’s camp anticipated.
Tensions flared and they only really did so because of the fight Sainz was able to put up most weekends.
There was a litany of technical problems, particularly on Sainz’s side of the garage, which means direct comparisons are tricky. They ended up 6-6 in comparative races they both finished but that’s discounting half a data set.
While it’s fair to say Verstappen was generally the stronger driver on Sundays, the final 62-31 points difference in Verstappen’s favour is misleading.
Sainz spent 41.1% racing laps ahead of Verstappen and qualified ahead 47.8% of the time, statistics that even eclipse Ricciardo’s, meaning he gets the nod as Verstappen’s toughest team-mate yet.
