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Amid a lack of truly inspiring options to pick Max Verstappen’s team-mate from and an increasingly punishing erosion of its car advantage, it’s time Red Bull pursued the driver it snubbed just over a month ago.
Despite him coming off the back of two weekends where he’d scored just four points, Red Bull handed Sergio Perez a new two-year deal and effectively shunned Carlos Sainz, leaving him to pick between Sauber, Williams and Alpine.
But since then, as Sainz has become frozen in indecision (with the potential carrot of a Mercedes seat dangled in front of him), Perez’s mini-slump now looks like the worst version of his regular mid-season Red Bull dip.
Red Bull and Perez are being punished more than ever for that poor run of form now that Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren have at various points this year all had cars to beat it with.
That’s inevitably led to Red Bull assessing alternatives if it decides to drop Perez well before the end of his new contract - something a rumoured break clause of Perez dropping 100 behind Verstappen would facilitate.
Red Bull still appears unwaveringly cold on promoting Yuki Tsunoda to the senior team but his RB team-mate Daniel Ricciardo seems to be an option if he can come up with a sustained run of form until the summer break. So too is Liam Lawson - who has tested the 2024 Red Bull this week.
The thing is, there’s still a far better candidate outside of the Red Bull family - just as there has been ever since Lewis Hamilton decided to leave Mercedes to take Sainz’s Ferrari seat.
The case for Sainz
Sainz has been a great match for Charles Leclerc in the four years they’ve been Ferrari team-mates. There are probably only three drivers on the grid he’d have been dropped for, and he was incredibly unlucky that one of those wanted to replace him.
His 2024 season has been stellar, with the obvious high claiming victory in Melbourne on his return from missing Jeddah with appendicitis.
But there have been plenty of other impressive performances, too. He has a marginal advantage over one of F1’s best drivers over one lap (a qualifying average of 5.18 vs 5.25 for Leclerc) and once again he’s looked the stronger driver during Ferrari’s latest performance dip.
It’s that qualifying edge and ability to dig deep when the car is far from the driver’s liking that would make him such a valuable asset to Red Bull and give him a chance to do consistently what Perez, Alex Albon and Pierre Gasly have all failed to do.
Performing so well when you know your team doesn’t want you anymore and winning the first time back from appendicitis tells you all you need to know about Sainz’s mental resilience.
Now, Ricciardo’s Red Bull peaks arguably edge Sainz’s best Ferrari moments but Ricciardo just isn’t the driver of 2014-16 anymore.
He’s had flashes of speed in 2024, sure, but he’s lacked the consistency that would make it worth picking a 35-year-old Ricciardo over a 29-year-old Sainz.
Age is a factor because Red Bull must consider what on earth it would do if Verstappen did make a bombshell move away from the team before the end of his contract in 2028.
It can’t be left with a combination of Perez/Ricciardo/Lawson and a driver it doesn’t trust to have a chance in its senior team in Tsunoda.
Of course, Red Bull could look elsewhere then but with so many of F1’s elite drivers signing long-term deals with their respective teams, it could be slim pickings.
Having a solid Verstappen-Sainz line-up at Red Bull would give RB the freedom to become a junior team once more, to experiment with all-rookie line-ups in the knowledge the main team is shored up. Making concrete plans for the likes of Isack Hadjar and Arvid Lindblad would be a start.
Red Bull could promote Lawson straight into the senior team, one potential option it's evaluated with his 2024 Red Bull test.
But you have to wonder - if Lawson was so Red Bull-level impressive during his five-race stint last year, why was Red Bull happy to leave him on the sidelines for 2024?
Adaptability has always been Lawson's greatest skill. He won on his debut weekends in Super Formula, DTM and Formula 2 among others. But what’s his ceiling beyond that great initial adaptation?
Sainz has proven where his ceiling is at with how he’s compared to Verstappen at Toro Rosso, Lando Norris at McLaren, and Leclerc at Ferrari.
It’s a ceiling that gives Red Bull the best chance of finally having two drivers who regularly make the best use of the machinery it produces for the first time in six seasons.
That’s vital if it has any interest in winning the constructors’ championship next year as well as the drivers'.
But what about the tension?
You can’t mention Verstappen-Sainz without acknowledging the tension between their camps that has always made Red Bull tentative about a reunion.
But eight years have passed since they parted - and Verstappen and Sainz are far more their own men now. Back then they were only 18 and 21 respectively.
Verstappen has since won three world championships and undergone a monumental transformation in how he operates both on and off the track. While Sainz has come through a tricky year and a bit with Renault and rebounded to establish himself as one of F1’s top drivers at McLaren and Ferrari.
And Sainz knows that his other options are three teams who have collectively scored fewer points in the whole of 2024 than Verstappen did in the British GP.
Red Bull is his only hope of having a competitive race-winning car and it can take advantage of that by dictating conditions. Sainz has tasted that feeling - of having a car that gives him a real shot - more than ever in 2024 and you can’t underestimate the will to remain in a position like that in 2025, while anticipating the sensations of instead trying to haul a Sauber out of Q1.
So going up against Verstappen is always a risk for any driver. It can completely destroy your reputation in frontrunning teams forever. But Sainz would go in better-prepared than anybody has since Ricciardo's exit.
It would be in Red Bull’s interests to make it work, too. An embarrassing fallout between team-mates has the worst-case scenario of being the final controversy that breaks Red Bull.
But it has the huge upside of shoring up its position at the front with two drivers who can actually match the balance of Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren’s driver line-ups.
It has to back itself as a team capable of having two top drivers in the senior team again. If it’s not Sainz, eventually somebody else - perhaps someone like Hadjar or Lindblad - will come along and Red Bull will have to manage that situation.
In fact, it’s even had to deal with Verstappen-Perez tensions on occasion so there’s no guarantee things wouldn’t turn sour again with Perez fighting tooth and nail to hold onto his seat.
Verstappen-Sainz wouldn’t be a surprise problem either. Red Bull knows the risks of that line-up and it would have time, informed by the lessons of 2015, to do everything it could to mitigate them.
Signing Sainz creates a problem, yes. But it also solves a much bigger one.
