For the first three years Daniel Ricciardo held his own as Verstappen continued on his learning curve, until the Aussie upped sticks and left for Renault. Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon then had their turns, and both found it to be a much harder job than they had perhaps expected.

For 2021 Red Bull looked outside the in-house talent pool and decided that Perez, a veteran with a reputation as a points gathering machine, could fit the bill better than an eager to impress youngster.

And for the first three years, when the team had a very strong package, he did what was needed, logging wins and poles and very occasionally even beating Verstappen. In 2023, when the RB19 was utterly dominant, he finished second in the championship – although he scored only two wins to the 19 of his team-mate.

The gap between the pair was disguised by the advantage over the opposition. However that changed this year. After what appeared to be a solid start relative to the opposition the RB20 proved to be a difficult beast to tame, even for Verstappen.

Perez began the year with a run of five podiums in four races, and he was usually pretty close to Verstappen in qualifying. However, in the three races where he earned second he was respectively 22, 13 and 12 seconds behind his team-mate at the flag, and when he was third – with Lando Norris in between – the gap was 19 seconds.

All of that could still be considered respectable. But a quarter of the way into the season rivals began to step up, and Red Bull faltered.

And while Verstappen outperformed the car and still logged wins, Perez became trapped in a spiral of poor performances, mistakes, and lost confidence.

The problem for Red Bull was that all this happened after Perez had already been signed up for the long-term. He was given the benefit of the doubt for a lacklustre race in Miami and a first lap crash in Monaco, and the deal was announced on June 4, ahead of the Canadian GP.

Remarkably in the 16 races that followed his confirmation Perez’s best result was sixth in Zandvoort, followed by four sevenths, a couple of eighths, and two 10th places. And along the way there have been silly mistakes that perhaps reflected the pressure that he was under.

Initially supportive, as each race went by Horner became more and more despairing in his comments about Perez.

Red Bull’s bosses meanwhile watched the team slide from first to third in the constructors’ championship as Verstappen was fighting solo against teams with two race-winning drivers.

The big question is why was Perez signed up early – and with a contract that his camp insists is watertight, with no performance clauses that would allow an easy resolution for the team?

The background to the timing was the turbulence in the camp at the time. The fallout of the Horner saga was still bubbling along, Adrian Newey was on the way out, Jos Verstappen was stirring the pot, and there were question marks over Max’s long term commitment.

Signing up Perez brought “continuity and stability”, as Horner noted in the announcement release.

The unspoken subtext was that he was also a team-mate that Max was more than happy to have alongside him for two more years – which also explains why Carlos Sainz was not pursued as an option, despite being on the market since January.

Both Verstappens claim that there was no issue in reuniting the 2015 Toro Rosso line-up, which at the time was famously a little stressful. However it’s clear that Marko and Horner didn’t think it would work.

On Friday in Abu Dhabi I asked Horner if he had any regrets about jumping too soon.

“Obviously, at the time Sergio was performing extremely well,” he said. “I think he had, what, four podiums in the first five races?

“And in order to settle his mind and extend that run of form for the rest of the season, we elected to go early – which obviously didn’t work.

“That’s just life sometimes. And I think Checo, you have to look beyond this year for the contribution he’s made to our team. He’s been a great team player. He’s a great person. He’s extremely popular within the team.

“He’s worked very hard over the four years that he’s been with us, and he’s played a vital role in the constructors’ championships that we’ve won, the five grands prix victories that he had in our car, it’s been the most successful pairing that we’ve ever had, finishing first and second in the drivers’ championship last year.

“So I think nobody more is frustrated with the results than Checo, from his own high standards. And that’s obviously been painful for him, for the team, and we’ve worked tremendously hard to try and support him.”

Booting Daniel Ricciardo out of VCARB for the US GP was the first real sign that plans were being made. It gave Liam Lawson a six-race audition for the RBR job, having already shown well when deputising for Ricciardo in 2023.

Meanwhile just as Lawson arrived on the scene Franco Colapinto was making his mark, and for a while there was a serious chance that Red Bull would buy the Argentinian out of his Williams contract, with the sponsorship he would bring potentially making up for the associated cost.

A few mistakes saw Colapinto fall off the radar and Lawson reinstated as the obvious RBR option, despite Yuki Tsunoda having a strong claim having beaten both his 2024 team-mates in the qualifying battle.

So where do things stand now? Perez’s manager Julian Jakobi, the man who famously juggled the interests of Senna and Prost in their McLaren days, spent much of the Abu Dhabi weekend in talks with Horner.

Jakobi’s job is to get the best deal for his client – and if he’s not going to race in 2025 that means getting the contact paid in full, and potentially compensation on top, such as for loss of personal sponsorship.

Horner’s role is to minimise the financial and PR damage associated with dropping Perez, which is why a paid ambassadorial role with the team is one of the options he’s floated. He’s also got to keep his Austrian bosses happy – paying someone not to drive for two years will be painful – especially if the Mexican sponsorship disappears as well.

On Sunday night Horner faced a barrage of questions about what will happen next.

“Obviously those discussions will happen between Checo and the team now we’ve got the season out of the way,” he said. “We’ll sit down with him and reflect on the season, and obviously where it’s gone wrong, and collectively, work out what is the right and appropriate way forward.”

“Having two drivers scoring on a regular and collective basis in the constructors’ championship is crucial”

Pushed on a timeline he added: “There’s no immediate rush. All the permutations are available to us internally. So I think the first thing is to sit down with Checo and have that conversation now that the season is completed.

“Sitting here, and now he’s still our driver, so it would be wrong for me to speculate on what next year may look like, until he and I have sat down and discussed this year, and we reflect on it as a team.”

The bottom line is that Red Bull needs someone in the car who can score vital constructors’ points, and where possible ride shotgun for Verstappen and take points off others – something that only happened in a handful of races at the start of 2024.

“I think you can see having two drivers scoring on a regular and collective basis in the constructors’ championship is crucial,” said Horner.

“Ferrari will be strong with their lineup next year. McLaren have a strong lineup. Mercedes will have an inexperienced driver in one of their seats. And so for us, it’s very important that both of our drivers are delivering, and there’s not a significant gap.”

As for the options he said: “I think Liam in challenging circumstances has done a very good job. If you analyse what he’s done and in the time that he’s had and the race pace that he’s had, I think Yuki has done a good job.

“So in the event that anything was decided with Checo, they would be the candidates, obviously, that we look towards.”

Whatever the solution, it’s hardly optimal. Lawson is not short of confidence, and is clearly good. But is he both good enough and ready to take on a Verstappen who is at the top of his game, with only 11 GP starts to his name?

Many observers think Tsunoda deserves the first shot, but some at RBR are not convinced. Either way a better and more consistent car would certainly help.

“Obviously the benchmark is always your team-mate, and the car has won nine races with Max at the wheel,” says Horner. “It’s had 10 poles. It’s had, I forget how many podiums, but a significant amount of podiums and fastest laps.

“It’s been far from the easiest car and Max is the hardest team-mate in the world to have. So it’s a difficult job to sit next to Max, and to extract the maximum from the car.

“And for sure, RB20 has been one of the more challenging cars that we’ve produced. It’s operational window of extracting the maximum performance has been very, very narrow, and that’s something that we’ll be working to broaden next year.”

In a parallel universe somewhere Red Bull would have snapped up Sainz within weeks of him becoming available, and given Perez time to make other arrangements – which is how the Sainz/Hamilton scenario played out at Ferrari.

Verstappen and Sainz, a decade after their frosty period as Toro Rosso youngsters fighting for attention, would have been a stellar line-up – and one that ensured RBR had a top-line driver in the camp should Verstappen walk away in the next couple of years…