Monaco GP qualifying prang dents Sergio Perez’s F1 title hopes

Four races in – and still Sergio Pérez was hanging in there, not letting team-mate Max Verstappen off the hook as the 2023 world championship apparently distilled into a battle between the Red Bull drivers. This had been against general expectations. But not so dissimilar to the start of 2022, other than this Red Bull has a bigger advantage over the competition.

There was a brief period in the first part of last season when Pérez was providing stiff competition for Verstappen. You may recall how it came to a head after Monaco, a race Pérez won, partly because he’d brought out the red flags on his final Q3 run, preventing Verstappen from completing a lap which had looked set to vault him ahead on the grid. It was Pérez and Verstappen’s respective starting positions of second and fourth which was the difference between first and third on race day. Verstappen believed Pérez had spun deliberately and wasn’t shy of saying so even to the outside world. So it can be imagined how it was inside the team.

Max’s father Jos took to Max’s own website to express his disappointment with how Red Bull had not prioritised Max in their race strategy. Helmut Marko immediately took issue with Jos for doing so. Resentments simmered even after Max’s previous performance superiority was resumed in subsequent races and he left Pérez far behind – and this came out into the open in the season’s penultimate race where Verstappen refused to help the team’s attempt at gaining Pérez second in the championship. Red Bull convened a meeting, grievances were aired and everyone got on with their lives. The team developed its new car for 2023, the RB19, and Verstappen proceeded to blitz the field with it in the opening race, with Pérez a very distant second. From the outside, it seemed like the natural order of things, a continuation of the latter half of last season.

But Pérez just wasn’t seeing it like that. He was much more at ease in the RB19 than he’d been in the RB18 as it had been in the latter half of the season. It didn’t have that car’s nervous rear feel which Verstappen had been able to exploit to such great effect but which cost Pérez confidence. With its new anti-squat rear suspension, the RB19 had more downforce all round, through all operating conditions, didn’t require that loose rear to get the desired quick rotation. It drove more like a conventional car. He was only so far behind Verstappen in Bahrain, he insisted, because of the delay he’d suffered in re-passing Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari, which had beaten him off the line. Were it not for that, he believed he could have given Max a serious race. Since then he’d won in Jeddah (helped by Verstappen’s Q2 driveshaft failure putting him 13 places behind on the grid) but had a troubled Melbourne, as the glitch virus switched cars within the Red Bull garage.

So this coming trio of ’23 races was going to be significant in confirming or refuting Pérez’s conviction that he can take the fight to Verstappen this year. Even better for Pérez, two of these three races were at venues – Baku and Monaco – where he invariably shines.

“Pérez appeared to have an edge around the Baku streets”

Furthermore in Baku he had two bites at the cherry, the Azerbaijan race being the first of six this season run to the Sprint format, with eight points on offer for a Sprint win. The new qualifying format for the 2023 Sprint events means two separate qualifying sessions, one for the Sprint, and a separate one for the grand prix. Pérez out-qualified Verstappen by a tenth in the former and lost out to him by a tenth in the latter. Game very much on for Pérez – and he got off to a flying start by dominating the Saturday Sprint race, as Verstappen was delayed by damage taken on the first lap from George Russell’s Mercedes. The Sprint result no longer determines the grand prix grid though and so Pérez ran the early stages there in second, behind his pole-setting team-mate. But this wasn’t a support driver second. Pérez was right there, pushing and probing Verstappen and about to try for a DRS-assisted pass on him when Verstappen peeled off into the pitlane for his new tyres. (click here for F1 Tactics)

A subsequent safety car shortly after Verstappen had left the pits allowed Pérez to take his pitstop with the field at reduced speed – springing him into the lead. Despite pushing hard for the remainder of the race, Verstappen could never quite get into Pérez’s DRS zone.

The hard tyres allowed them both to push hard and Pérez, under the biggest pressure, kept his nerve and won. He’d been able to get into Max’s DRS zone in the first stint but Verstappen had not been able to do the same to him in the second. Pérez appeared to have a small but genuine edge around the Baku streets and might have won even without the safety car’s help.

Miami a week later was a much more conventional track and Verstappen was expected to regain the initiative here, and through the practices he had a consistent 0.3-0.4sec advantage. Pérez narrowed that a little in Q1 and Q2 but into Q3 Verstappen aborted his first attempt after over-committing through Turn 5. He was just beginning his second new tyre attempt with the session counting down when Leclerc brought out the red flags after crashing his Ferrari. All of which put Pérez on an unlikely pole, eight places ahead of Verstappen on the grid. It took only 15 laps of the race before Verstappen was up to second, a few seconds behind Pérez.

Another flat-out duel ensued, but this time tempered by having to control tyre temperatures. This is where Verstappen’s speed in the slow corners forced Pérez – on softer tyres – to make the time back up over the lap through the fast sweeps of Sector 1. Ultimately, this took more from his tyres and by the time of the first stops Verstappen was upon him, overtaking early into the second stint. A Verstappen victory, but one Pérez had really made him work for. The cancellation of Imola (Click here for more information) may have been viewed with favour by Pérez, as it moved their contest straight onto his happy hunting ground of Monaco.

What Pérez did there in the first session of qualifying was scarcely credible. With no apparent pressure – he was in a Red Bull and it was Q1 – he crashed heavily at Sainte Devote, destroying the rear of the car, rendering him unable to take any further part in qualifying and leaving him last on the grid. Verstappen, meanwhile, went on to deliver one of the most dramatic Monaco pole laps ever seen. “I can’t believe what I’ve just done,” said a devastated Pérez afterwards, full in the knowledge that his title challenge had probably just collapsed at the very venue he was expected to star.

“In terms of the psychology of battle, it was a blow for Pérez”

When Verstappen took a dominant win the following day and Pérez was out of the points after a scrappy race with no safety car opportunities, it left him 39 points behind. Mathematically, with 15 races still to go, it wasn’t disastrous, but in terms of the psychology of battle, the mental attrition of a title fight against a formidable rival, it was a devastating blow. Especially as it was 100% from his own hand.

Verstappen’s pole was a much more impressive feat than might be imagined as the only guy represented in Q3 in 2023’s dominant car. It simply would not bring its front tyres up to temperature at the start of the lap and required two preparation laps – which lost it the peak grip of the tyre. That might not have mattered so much were it not for the supreme form of Fernando Alonso in the Aston Martin. At the end of sector 2 of their final Q3 laps, the Aston was almost 0.3sec ahead. Verstappen was expecting this, but also knew that the Aston was weak in the final sector, not good at getting the power down out of Rascasse and Noghes. Could he recover that deficit in those few corners? Rarely, if ever, has a car bounced its tyre sidewalls off the barriers quite so dramatically as he gave it his all. It was enough to secure pole by eight-hundredths of a second.

The Red Bull’s advantage is always far greater on race day than in qualifying and so it was again here. Verstappen left Alonso steadily further behind in the early stages. But he needed to – because the Aston had started on the hard tyre, with Verstappen on the medium. The extra worry about that for Red Bull was the radar was suggesting late-race rain. If Alonso could run all the way up to the rain on the same set of tyres but Verstappen could not, they’d have an extra 21sec of pitstop loss to contend with. It was only ever about these two and their opposing tyre strategies, for Esteban Ocon in third place was determined to run a slow pace to extend the life of the medium compound tyres fitted to his Alpine and fell far behind, bottling up the Ferrari and Mercedes drivers behind him, then bolting early for his tyre change.

Carlos Sainz had earlier bounced off the back of the Alpine at the chicane, damaging a front wing endplate but he was dismayed by Ferrari bringing him in too soon after Ocon to protect against being undercut by Lewis Hamilton. Pitting before the rain negated the advantage of Sainz’s hard tyre choice and a later trip down the escape road in the wet dropped him back to eighth, with Hamilton and George Russell taking fourth and fifth respectively in their updated Merc W14s ahead of the Ferrari of Leclerc who’d qualified third but been demoted three places for baulking Lando Norris.

For Verstappen and Alonso the moment of truth approached as the rain arrived on lap 51 (of 78), initially just between the Fairmont Hairpin and Portier. Both the Red Bull and Aston were still on their original tyres. Verstappen had controlled the graining phase of his mediums but they were now, just like Alonso’s, very worn and as the rain began to spread, those tyre temps began to take a dive – Alonso’s especially. It was easy to know that new tyres were needed, not so easy to guess which ones, given that the radar was suggesting only light rain for a short duration. On the 54th lap it was still only that little section beginning at the hairpin and up to the tunnel which was really treacherous. Alonso and his race engineer discussed what to do. Alonso pointed out that they should do something different to Verstappen, but without knowing what that was going to be. Between them, they called it for medium-compound slicks.

“Alonso found the rain pouring hard. They’d called it wrong”

As soon as Alonso reached Massenet at the top of the hill on his out-lap to find the rain pouring down hard, he knew they’d called it wrong. But they’d been able to give themselves the luxury of that call by having more than a pitstop worth of gap over Ocon and so he was in again for a corrective stop for inters on the next lap. This was just after Verstappen had finally jettisoned his slicks for inters. Had Alonso opted for inters immediately, stopping as he did a lap earlier than Verstappen, he’d have taken a lot of time out of him. But maybe not enough. Verstappen was 8sec clear when Alonso had stopped. Verstappen would almost certainly have won this one regardless.

A bit of jeopardy from an in-team challenge? Gone. From a car which wouldn’t switch on its tyres at a track where pole was essential? Sorted. From a bit of rain and a better tyre choice from the formidable Alonso? No worries. Max left Monaco with a 39-point advantage and a career total 39 GP wins.