Sergio Perez has described Red Bull as a “different world’ to what he has experienced before, which has contributed to the 2021 Formula 1 season proving to be more difficult than he anticipated.
The 31-year-old has made an encouraging start to his Red Bull career and is on a trajectory that is expected to earn him a new deal for next year, winning the Azerbaijan Grand Prix and helping Red Bull to lead Mercedes in the constructors’ championship.
But the step up to a top team from a midfield operation to an F1 powerhouse has proved to be a bigger one than Perez expected after seven seasons at the team he first joined in 2014 when it competed as Force India.
While what is now called Aston Martin was ramping up in Perez’s final seasons with the team, it is still in the process of transforming itself into a big F1 team – as the recent spate of highly-accomplished new recruits and technical restructuring proves.
This means Perez moved into a team that is far larger and with better facilities than anything he has experienced before, even during his brief spell at McLaren in 2013.
As other drivers have discovered, moving from a smaller to a bigger team simply means more of everything – including the range of so-called tools available to impact the car dynamically.
This was something Valtteri Bottas was struck by when he jumped from Williams to Mercedes in 2017. Getting on top of that complexity and learning the way to extract the most from the car and fine tune it for every possible change in conditions takes time.
While it was clear Perez faced a huge challenge in going up against Max Verstappen in equal machinery, he insists that is secondary to adapting to the team.
“We all know in this business how good Max is, he delivers at an extremely high level since FP1,” said Perez when asked by The Race if being benchmarked against Verstappen contributed to the move proving harder than expected.
“But I’m focused on my side, on trying to get fully comfortable with things, fully up to speed with just driving the car.
“It was just a very different world to what I was used to. There are probably teams out there that are similar to others, but I went to another extreme. So I think that that made that a bit harder.
“But I am getting there. I think every single weekend we see good improvement and I see no reason why I cannot get any better in the next five races, to go another step.
“So I think I’m happy with it my progression so far, with the level that I’m delivering. But obviously, it’s not enough and I want more than that.”
Perez has racked up 96 points so far this season. That tally is only nine fewer than predecessor Alex Albon scored in the entirety of last season, albeit in a less competitive Red Bull.
He has finished in the top five in every race except for Imola, where he spun away fourth place and finished 11th. As well as his win in Baku, he claimed third place at Paul Ricard.
Qualifying has been a bigger challenge than the races, Perez beating Verstappen only at Imola – where he was frustrated to miss out on pole position after a conservative run through the final corner – with an average deficit of half-a-percent.
Recently, his underlying pace has looked stronger than the qualifying results suggest, as in Azerbaijan, France and last weekend’s Styrian Grand Prix small errors meant that he didn’t put together the lap time he was capable of. But qualifying has always been a weaker suit for Perez than his race performances.
However, Perez is still completing the process of acclimatising to life at Red Bull, meaning he is confident there is more to come.
Having originally given himself five races to get on top of the car before, right on time, winning on his sixth start, he now believes he needs another five to make a fair evaluation on his performances.
“I found it harder than expected, the change of team,” said Perez when asked to rate his season so far.
“The fact that I came to such a different team in terms of power unit, car and so on, it was a big change so it took me longer than expected to get up to speed and I’m just getting better.
“I wouldn’t like to put a number yet [on progress]. Obviously, I hoped for more by now but still the season is very long, so ask me the question in five races time.”
