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Red Bull’s decision to keep Sergio Perez as Max Verstappen’s Formula 1 team-mate after the summer break has sparked some wild theories in search of an explanation.
On current form, Perez is trending to cost Red Bull the constructors’ championship. McLaren will overtake the world champion team before the end of 2024 if it keeps outscoring Red Bull at its current average rate.
Why is Red Bull risking that? The simple answer is it was scrambling for any reason not to drop Perez as that is by far the easiest option.
The core consideration appears to have been whether Red Bull has done everything possible to get Perez back to his strong early-season form, when he was regularly scoring podiums and sat second in the championship.
On review, bosses Christian Horner and Helmut Marko - who traditionally haven't hesitated over dropping drivers - felt more could be done to support him, whereas until now, Red Bull has hoped Perez will just suddenly get better again without changing anything.
So the priority becomes what to do differently so that everyone can expect an improvement rather than just living in hope of a breakthrough from nowhere.
WHAT MIGHT CHANGE
The first port of call will be to evaluate potential personnel changes. Red Bull has done this before. When Alex Albon was struggling back in 2020, Red Bull changed his race engineer and brought the experienced Simon Rennie back in, as it was felt Albon’s life was being made harder than it needed to be.
There have been excessive complaints about Perez's side of the garage from his fans, and it is believed that Perez himself has argued for better support.
Shuffling parts of this support team around is unlikely to transform the situation but if Red Bull feels that Perez needs a different voice in his ear or would benefit from a shake-up of how the team looks after him and his car, from an engineering perspective, then it will at least try to offer that.
Then there’s the car itself. Perez has clearly been uncomfortable with the RB20 for a long time.
It has been difficult to judge the specific issues because Perez has been on slightly different specifications to Verstappen in recent races, but by and large both drivers have shared similar feedback - which is that this car has once again slipped into having a narrower operating window the more it has been developed.
This seems to be negatively impacting Perez more. Take his season from Imola in mid-May onwards, which is when his results nosedive and McLaren starts to regularly take points out of his Red Bull, and there is a clear correlation between Perez struggling and Red Bull adding more upgrades.
Some new parts already arrived in Japan a month before that, when Perez was still performing well, but it’s the Imola upgrade onwards that seems to be most associated with car behaviour issues. Is it the cause? Impossible to say for sure. But Red Bull’s willing to consider it.
And remember, Verstappen has been critical of its development of late, so Perez doesn’t stand alone in terms of disliking the direction the RB20 has taken.
Recently, a new front wing seemed to give Perez a better feel, but the situation is too short-term to prioritise upgrades around what he needs. Instead, the easier troubleshooting option is to roll back some upgrades and find a car spec that Perez is more comfortable with.
Does that mean going all the way back to how the car was in China in mid-April? That might be too extreme. But the suggestion is Red Bull is willing to prioritise Perez's confidence over a theoretically faster car spec.
If Perez can get close to 100% out of a car with fractionally lower potential, that might well be enough to get him back in the mix more often.
And the summer break is a good opportunity to look into this, either side of the shutdown, rather than blindly making changes mid-weekend.
INTERVENTION FROM ELSEWHERE?
You don’t need to look too hard to find wild speculation that this was really because of intervention from F1 and Liberty Media, and/or Perez’s long-term backers, amid panic over the financial impact this could have on the upcoming Mexican Grand Prix and the fear that Perez really could be dropped and out of F1 for good.
These parties were almost certainly all concerned about the consequences of Perez falling off the grid. They may well have tried to have a say. But there is no evidence to suggest that it influenced the Horner/Marko conversation, only very loose speculation being treated as fact.
Red Bull is fixated on winning both world championships because that has huge sporting and financial incentives.
Even in the desperately unlikely event Greg Maffei or Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim personally guaranteed to pay the difference between finishing first and second in the constructors’ championship - and honour the bonuses of 1600-odd people at Red Bull Racing working hard to win these titles - that wouldn’t cover the reputational damage and sporting loss of being beaten.
One of the reasons these theories gained traction is a supposed claim that Red Bull had informed the Verstappen camp on Sunday night there would be a change. So something must have happened to suddenly change the plan. But this is thought to be incorrect.
It’s possible that Horner and/or Marko were leaning towards a change but this was not communicated to anybody and their meeting on the Monday after the Belgian GP was always meant to be an opportunity to discuss the matter properly and come to a final decision.
HOW SAFE IS HE?
Immediately after word of Perez being retained emerged on Monday, the exact nature of his reprieve was cast into doubt. So is he really in the car for the rest of the season? Red Bull has left itself wiggle room.
Timing is important for two reasons. There’s an argument that Perez has just cleared a bunch of tracks that he's had issues with in the past - remember, he had that horrible mid-season run last year as well.
It's possible he's just gone through the worst of it, and now has some tracks coming up that Red Bull believe will bring the best out of him, with Azerbaijan and Singapore the scenes of past Perez victories.
So, this would be the worst possible time to drop him, because then Red Bull and Perez have suffered all of the bad stuff, and the lost points, having failed to provide better support to assist him, all before he has a real chance to provide some of the peaks that Red Bull knows Perez can produce.
The flip side is if it doesn't work now, then then it's never going to work. Which is the second reason why this run of races is so important.
Unusually F1 has an autumn gap in the schedule after Baku and Singapore. That’s another opportunity to pause, reflect on whether anything has changed, and maybe be slightly clearer on where the championship picture is too.
There is no guarantee, right now, that Perez is 100% in the car for the rest of the year. Just that he will be in it after the summer break.
