Perez has won his ‘greatest grand prix’, but he’ll have to start a civil war if he wants to win the title

Sergio Perez isn’t at Red Bull Racing to be Max Verstappen’s number two.

We know this because he says it often. He says it when he wins races. He says it when he’s asked to help his teammate win races.

It’s just that over the last two seasons Perez has almost always finished second to Verstappen. He may not be formally cast at the Dutchman’s sidekick, but he’s yet to perform at a level that suggests he could become Red Bull Racing’s leading man.

But there’s a subtle difference to the way things are panning out this season.

We’re only two races into the year, but few doubts remain that the 2023 championship is a two-driver fight between teammates Perez and Verstappen. No external rivals; just two sides of the same garage.

An intrateam battle has the potential to completely change the rules of engagement, and with Perez winning comfortably in Jeddah, he’s stating his claim for promotion from supporting cast to leading role.

But he’ll have to risk everything if he wants to go all the way.

Why his Saudi Arabian win was so impressive

Verstappen looked on track to dominate the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix weekend right until he wasn’t, with a drive shaft failure knocking him out of qualifying in 15th.

Perez seemingly had things all his tied up — but only the first 16 laps or so, after which the safety car reset the race.

Suddenly Verstappen was right back behind him, and with half the race to go the gap between them was just 5.4 seconds.

Yet the Dutchman’s seemingly inevitable charge for victory never materialised.

At first the team attempted to tell both drivers to hold station with a target lap time. Perez obeyed at first — until he realised that Verstappen was ignoring the order.

But every time the Dutchman upped his pace, Perez unleashed a little more performance. Lap after lap both cars got faster and faster but he gap remained the same.

It took until lap 43 of 50 for Verstappen to realise his teammate couldn’t be caught, and relented, defeated.

It wasn’t the sort of thrilling wheel-to-wheel battle that’ll make the highlights real at the end of the season, but it was a perfectly judged act of on-track defiance by Perez against Verstappen’s determination to win the race despite his team’s commands to cruise the car to the finish.

He was no number-two driver that night.

“I enjoyed it a lot, especially at the end, just pushing each other with the lap times, knowing that he went a tenth faster, a tenth slower, a tenth faster,” Perez said. “It was all pretty intense.”

Even team boss Christian Horner was impressed.

“That was I think his greatest grand prix,” he told Sky Sports afterwards.

One victory doesn't make a title challenge

So it was an undeniably great performance, but can Perez keep it up?

His form last season suggests not.

He started similarly strongly, with pole in Saudi Arabia that would have led to victory were it not for a badly time safety car.

Still, he bounced back strongly with six podiums in the following eight races, including a victory in Monaco that got him to within 15 points of Verstappen’s lead.

But he fell away after that. He outqualified Verstappen only three more times and collected only five more podiums, only one of which was a win. He was blown away 454-305 in the final standings.

Consider too that Perez has always been good around street circuits. Both of his pole positions have come in Saudi Arabia, and four of his five wins just under a third of his 28 podiums have come on public streets.

Combined it paints a picture that urges caution rather than promotes the idea that Perez might be in the early stages of a genuine challenge.

But there’s some reason for optimism too. Last year’s fade-out was partly due to the RB18 being developed to better suit Verstappen after a troublesome start to life. This year the team believes it has a machine that can work for both drivers, so far Perez has sounded positive about the tools he has at his disposal with the RB19.

And considering Red Bull Racing appears to have a massive advantage over the field, Perez might get more time to mould his car around him rather than being railroaded into a development program that makes the car faster but at the expense of his preferences.

Perez has only one route to the championship, and it's not pretty

But all that said, could Perez really beat Verstappen? Does he really have what it takes to outrace a generational talent like Max in a straight fight?

It’s been done before. Just ask Nico Rosberg.

In the book of workmanlike drivers usurping their star teammates, Rosberg’s chapter on beating Lewis Hamilton to the 2016 championship is as prolific — and instructive.

No-one, not even the German himself, will try to tell you that Rosberg was faster than Hamilton that year. But he was smarter and arguably more determined to put himself in a position to capitalise on the Briton’s mistakes and misfortune.

He got the absolute maximum from himself in an effort so taxing that he retired at the end of the year, certain he would be unable to reproduce that level of focus again.

The mental strain was enormous because an intrateam battle of the sort he waged and won against Hamilton is fought as much off the track as well as on it.

The animosity inside Mercedes during their three years as teammates, culminating in 2016, was legendary. The atmosphere was so toxic that Toto Wolff was forced to randomly rotate mechanics between cars for that season to try to clear the air — and they still crashed into each other twice.

Both accused of breaking team rules on engine modes and strategies, and mind games were prolific.

Both were threatened with the sack after wiping each other out of the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix on the first lap, an escalation practically unheard of in modern Formula 1.

It’s the sort of behaviour a driver can just about get away with only when a team has no external enemies to unit against. Instead the two sides of the garage naturally turn against each other.

The question Perez has to ask himself is whether he’s prepared to risk everything on an internal war to see if Verstappen will crack.

A title battle could cost perez everything

There are signs that his teammate might be vulnerable to a ruthless full-frontal assault.

Rare though it is, there have been instances of dummy-spits that affect his performance. The most recent was last year’s Singapore Grand Prix.

He was forced to abandon a pole lap due to an underfuel error, for which he blasted his team and backed up by a shockingly ordinary performance in conditions in which he usually excels. Perez won that race from second on the grid.

Just this weekend, in Saudi Arabia, Rosberg told Sky Sports that Verstappen refused to show up to his engineering debrief on Saturday night after his drive shaft failed, for which he also unleashed on the team.

“When you‘re fighting for a championship and when it looks like it’s just between two cars, we have to make sure that also the two cars are reliable,” he said at the end of the weekend.

We know too that the Verstappen camp inside Red Bull Racing, led by father Jos Verstappen and manager Raymond Vermeulen, is volatile, to say the least.

They’ve been uncompromising in bending the team around Max.

There’s long been a rumour that they were key influencers in the team’s Sky Sports boycott late last year over commentary regarding Verstappen’s 2021 championship victory.

There was also the memorable team orders debacle in Brazil last year, after which Vermeulen was seen in animated conversation with Christian Horner and Helmut Marko after last year’s team orders drama in Brazil. The team later published a watered-down media release exonerating Max.

That incident was clear evidence that Verstappen feels so empowered by the situation that he considers himself beyond reproach internally.

But if this year’s championship is fought exclusively between him and Perez, Red Bull Racing will feel at least some obligation to deliver a fair battle. Not to do so would risk having 2023 defined by the mismanagement of its drivers and tarnish what ought to be a glittering achievement.

And in that case what is ordinarily an entrenched unlosable position might be ripe for wedging by a strong internal challenge.

It would risk destabilising the team that is already missing the late Dietrich Mateschitz from its foundations. Perez would be playing with his career at the team.

But as Rosberg demonstrated, sometimes that’s the only way to close an otherwise unbridgeable gap of pure pace.

But that’s all academic for now, just two rounds into the season.

First Perez needs to prove he can win his battles on the track. Only then might he have the chance to win the war.