Mark Hughes: 'Perez may have to fight Red Bull for 2023 F1 title'

The numbers work in a very different way when the points battle for a world championship is between two drivers in the same very dominant car. Take Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost in their two seasons together at McLaren, 1988 and ’89: they won one championship apiece in that time, but if we look at how many times each of them beat the other, the score is heavily in Senna’s favour. Taking out mechanical issues and other circumstantial elements, in the 24 races where a straight comparison could be made over those two seasons, Senna beat Prost 17 times. Prost beat Senna seven times. But with just an arbitrary points difference between first and second, the points battle made the contest way closer than their respective performances merited. On performance alone, Senna annihilated Prost at McLaren.

Let’s look at Nico Rosberg’s 2016 victory over Lewis Hamilton in the dominant Mercedes. There were 15 races in which it was possible to make a straight comparison. Of those, Hamilton beat Rosberg 10 times. Rosberg beat Hamilton five times.

In such circumstances, reliability has an enormous swing power. When the difference between first and second is, say, seven points (as it is currently) but the penalty for a non-finish is 25, finishing is more powerful than beating your opponent. Way more powerful. With a car so dominant that your team-mate can be almost guaranteed to win any race which you don’t finish and who can be almost guaranteed to finish second any time you beat him, that’s just the way it is.

Reliability can have a massively skewing effect on the outcome, regardless of the performance hierarchy between the two drivers. If Max Verstappen suffered two DNFs in the next two races (and Sergio Pérez won them), it would take seven straight races of Verstappen-Pérez 1-2s for Max to get back on points parity. Now, you may say that no way is Pérez as close to Verstappen as Prost was to Senna or Rosberg was to Hamilton. It doesn’t matter. All the other driver has to be is good enough to win in a dominant car when his team-mate is sidelined and to finish second when he’s not. Pérez is comfortably good enough to do that. The rest is just reliability.

“Sergio Pérez feels he is looking at the biggest opportunity of his career”

Similarly, how Rosberg would compare to Prost, or Verstappen to Senna, or Hamilton to any of them is all irrelevant. It’s just about how the numbers work between the two guys in the dominant car regardless of anyone’s level. That’s all history records.

As such, Pérez feels he is looking at the biggest opportunity of his career, one perhaps he never imagined would come his way. Should he and Verstappen enjoy comparable reliability, Verstappen wins every time. But both Jeddah and Melbourne illustrated just how easily one driver or the other can have their weekend badly compromised by a single mechanical issue.

When Pérez says – as he did in Melbourne – that he expects the same opportunities as Verstappen to fight for the world title, what he’s effectively saying is that in the event of him gaining a points advantage through any Verstappen unreliability, he wants the chance to capitalise.

But regardless of what Pérez says about how he trusts Red Bull to give those equal opportunities, this team revolves around the phenomenon that is Verstappen every bit as surely as it used to around Sebastian Vettel. Since day one the Verstappens have effectively dictated their terms to Red Bull. From the Verstappens’ perspective, they have been loyal through five years of Red Bull not delivering Max title-calibre cars. Only in the last three seasons has that been delivered and from their point of view it’s only right that Max takes the full benefit. If it was only about performance there’d be nothing to discuss. But in the event that it’s not, in the event that a bad roll of the reliability dice should give the support driver the advantage, how would Red Bull deal with that? And how would Verstappen?

In that situation Pérez would have to fight his own corner, even against the team if necessary. Lewis Hamilton did so in Hungary in 2007 for his third F1 victory, compromising the team, going against plan and tricking himself an advantage over McLaren team-mate Fernando Alonso in the fuel burn-off phase of qualifying. Charles Leclerc did it at Ferrari at Monza in 2019, declining to give team-mate Sebastian Vettel the payback tow Vettel had given him in the first runs. That was foundational to him winning that race, and to him becoming unambiguously the team’s leader. Vettel several times repelled the threat of Red Bull team-mate Mark Webber at the expense of the team.

Pérez is never going to take Red Bull team leadership status from Verstappen, but he may find himself in a situation this season where he has a choice of priorities – and have no doubt whatsoever that he will prioritise himself over the team. He’s a battle-hardened tough cookie and isn’t going to surrender the opportunity of a lifetime if it opens up for him.

Since he began covering grand prix racing in 2000, Mark Hughes has forged a reputation as the finest Formula 1 analyst of his generation
Follow Mark on Twitter @SportmphMark