Why being Max Verstappen’s Red Bull teammate is Formula One's hardest job

“Being teammates with Max at Red Bull as a young driver, I wouldn’t like to be in those shoes, if I’m honest. People cannot underestimate the level of challenge that there is in this seat.”

In comments that foreshadowed his now-confirmed departure from Red Bull Racing, Sergio Pérez laid bare the challenge his successor, expected to be Liam Lawson, would face as Max Verstappen’s Formula One teammate.

Lawson looks set to become Verstappen’s fifth Red Bull F1 teammate, following Daniel Ricciardo (2016-18), Pierre Gasly (2019), Alex Albon (2019-20) and Pérez (2021-24).

Not since Ricciardo, Verstappen’s first teammate at Red Bull, has a driver in the second seat proven to be any match for the Dutchman amid his evolution into a four-time world champion.

Red Bull knows the rigors the second seat places upon its drivers, which explains its patience with Pérez over the past two seasons. But his dwindling form through 2024, scoring 285 fewer points than Verstappen as Red Bull slumped to third in the constructors’ championship, left it little choice but to make a change — and leave Lawson, after just 11 grand prix starts, preparing for the toughest job in F1.

As Red Bull team principal Christian Horner put it on Sunday in Abu Dhabi before Pérez’s exit was confirmed, “Max is the hardest teammate in the world to have.”

It’s something Pérez and his predecessors all found out, arguably to their cost. And it runs far deeper than Verstappen’s obvious natural gifts behind the wheel.

A brief history of Verstappen’s Red Bull teammates

Since Red Bull promoted Verstappen to its senior F1 team just four races into the 2016 season at the tender age of 18, it was clear he would define the future of the team. He immediately justified the decision by scoring a victory on debut to become F1’s youngest-ever winner. Eight years, four world championships and 63 race wins later, that has proven to be the case, leaving his teammates to often play a support role at best and battle against the perception of being a ‘number two driver.’

Ricciardo’s place within Red Bull was sky-high after he defeated reigning four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel in their first (and only) season together in 2014. The Australian was equal to Verstappen, to begin with. It wasn’t until 2018 that the scales tipped in Verstappen’s favor, even if Ricciardo did bear the brunt of Red Bull’s bad luck that year. Ricciardo departed for Renault at the end of the year, feeling Red Bull’s support had shifted toward Verstappen.

Ricciardo’s replacement was Gasly, who stepped up after a solid first full season in F1 with Toro Rosso (now RB), which included a fourth-place finish in Bahrain. But he only lasted 12 races before being sent back to Toro Rosso, his final act being lapped by Verstappen in Hungary. Albon, a rookie, went in the opposite direction and steadied the ship enough to secure a contract for 2020, only to face scrutiny as his form slipped toward the end of the season. When Pérez, enjoying a strong campaign and scoring his maiden win at the Sakhir GP, became available after Racing Point terminated his contract to sign Vettel, Red Bull swept in and demoted Albon into a reserve role.

Pérez quickly made a good impression, winning his sixth race for Red Bull in Azerbaijan after a late red flag and a retirement for Verstappen. His finest moment came at the 2021 season finale in Abu Dhabi, where he deliberately slowed down Hamilton to bring Verstappen back into contention for the race win, secured on the last lap after race director Michael Masi’s incorrect application of the rule book led to the controversial restart. Pérez’s nickname as the ‘Mexican Minister of Defense’ gave him a place within Red Bull folklore.

As Verstappen dominated F1 under the new regulations, Pérez was a couple of steps behind but consistent enough to help Red Bull win the constructors’ titles in 2022 and 2023. A good start to 2024, including four podiums in the first five races, appeared to put Red Bull on course for a third straight championship double, but his form nosedived. In the remaining 19 races, Pérez scored fewer points than in the opening five.

Despite a contract extension intended to steady his form, Pérez’s slump only worsened amid Red Bull’s car struggles, prompting the team to enter talks at the end of the season to change plans for 2025.

Five teammates, none of whom have managed to truly challenge Verstappen. The only metric in which a teammate beat Verstappen at Red Bull was Ricciardo for the number of pole positions (the Australian won that head-to-head 3-0). But that was still very early in Verstappen’s career, prior to him becoming the powerhouse he is today.

A difficult car to tame

Last year, The Athletic sought to explain the assets that made Verstappen so fast. The best explanation came courtesy of his race engineer, GianPiero Lambiase.

“He has an extremely rare natural talent,” Lambiase said. “An innate feeling for the connection between himself, the car and the road.”

That connection has allowed Verstappen to develop a driving style that is difficult for other drivers to replicate. Unlike some who may prefer a more stable car that is predictable when turning into corners, Verstappen likes a sharp, ‘pointy’ front end. This means he can aggressively turn into the corners and still catch the rear without spinning — a dark art few can truly master.

As a result of this being the most comfortable driving style for Verstappen (and, therefore, the quickest way to get the most out of the Red Bull car), the development has tended to accentuate this kind of sharpness — something many of his teammates have struggled to cope with.

In an appearance on the High Performance Podcast last year, Albon, now racing at Williams, called Verstappen’s driving style “unique” and said it was “not that easy to get along with.”

“I like a car that has a good front end, so quite sharp, quite direct,” Albon said. “Max does, too, but his level of sharp and direct is a whole different level. It’s eye-wateringly sharp.

“To give people an explanation of what that might feel like, I don’t know if you guys play computer games at all, but if you bump up the sensitivity completely to the max, and you move that mouse, and it’s just darting across the screen everywhere, that’s how it feels. It becomes so sharp that it makes you a little bit tense.”

Albon explained that as the season went on, Verstappen would want the car to get sharper and sharper, allowing him to get quicker and quicker. Albon said it then left him needing to take more risks to try and catch up, resulting in mistakes or a crash that knocked the confidence.

“It just starts to snowball, and every time the car becomes sharper and sharper, you start to become more tense,” he explained. “If you start to not be in that flow state, and you’re having to really think about it, and going into a corner you don’t know how to react, it doesn’t work.”

That effort to overcompensate not only applies to trying to drive around the issue but also trying to rectify it through setup work. Pérez admitted at the end of 2023 that he got lost down too many rabbit holes trying to adjust the setup so he could get more out of it. He wanted to change his approach for 2024, something that worked initially, only for the difficulties Red Bull faced with its car to leave even Verstappen hamstrung. For Pérez, the struggles were felt far more acutely — partly, he believed, because it impacted his driving style more than Verstappen’s.

“We just took a wrong direction, and with driving styles, it impacts one driver more than the other,” Pérez said in Abu Dhabi. “The way it impacted me, it was a lot harder than, for example, it did to Max. Because of his driving, he can cope with a very neutral balance, and I couldn’t, so that was the main deficit, really.”

Red Bull has never expected Verstappen’s teammate to reach the same heights as the Dutchman, recognizing his place as a generational talent capable of feats most can’t replicate. But not being able to do what Verstappen does behind the wheel, matching his unique driving style, is seemingly a limitation for anyone across the Red Bull garage.

Pressure and scrutiny

When Albon mentioned the ‘snowball’ effect that can ensue when struggling to match Verstappen, the same goes for the pressure and scrutiny coming from all corners.

Internally, Red Bull has never shied away from taking tough, seemingly ruthless decisions across both of its teams. From demoting Daniil Kvyat to make way for Verstappen just four races into the 2016 season to this year’s decision to jettison Ricciardo from RB so Lawson could step up proves that Red Bull is not a sentimental team. It needs its drivers to perform.

In a beautiful piece paying tribute to his late friend, Anthoine Hubert, for The Players’ Tribune in 2021, Gasly spoke of the “difficult time” he had with Red Bull. “I didn’t feel like I was really supported and treated the same way as others there have been,” he wrote, believing “people there slowly began to turn on me” as early as his first mistake. There was an intense pressure to perform.

That was part of what made Red Bull’s decision to stick with Pérez through 2024, particularly when it held a midseason review after the Belgian Grand Prix, seem unusual. Horner was always clear that he wanted to give Pérez as much support as possible, to the extent the team gave him a contract extension in early June. Horner admitted in Abu Dhabi that move simply “didn’t work” to support Pérez’s return to his best form.

From the outside, there is always a lot of focus on the second Red Bull seat, given it is one of the most attractive on the grid to any drivers hoping to contend for victories and championships. And when a driver isn’t performing, that attention only grows.

Pérez found that out the hard way through 2024. He’d been subject to plenty of chatter around his contract in the past and responded well through 2023 by finishing as runner-up in the championship to Verstappen. This year, it was a recurring talking point through the summer, particularly as his form hit the skids. Pérez would always respond by pointing out the contract he had in place to race for Red Bull in 2025. Not until post-race in Abu Dhabi did he acknowledge talks were ongoing about what would happen next.

Albon admitted in his High Performance Podcast appearance that it got to a point through his struggles in 2020 where he was “not at all” enjoying being a Red Bull driver. “I was struggling with the attention around it,” he said. “Of course, I deleted all my socials, and I got away from the social media side of it. It was quite toxic, truthfully.

“Your seat is under the spotlight, the memes that come after you … it’s a very Gen Z-style of mocking, where you become almost a laughing stock. It’s the easy go-to.”

Speaking in Abu Dhabi, Verstappen expressed sympathy for Pérez’s struggles, saying that it was rare to find a teammate like him in F1.

“I find people have been very harsh on him,” Verstappen said. “Of course, some weekends maybe could have been better. But sometimes people have been very harsh on him because he’s not an idiot. He’s always been regarded as a great driver. It’s been tough, but it’s been tough for everyone in the team. Because sometimes (the car) was just very difficult to drive.”

The harsh reality for Pérez and all who came before him is that racing with the ultimate yardstick — an all-time great — across the garage is a challenge like no other in F1. It’s a chance to compete for the sport’s biggest prizes and be part of championship victories.

But the higher up the mountain you go, the thinner the air. It’s a pressure and a job that can make or break careers.

Whoever’s next will find that out, one way or another.

Top photo: Dan Istitene/Getty Images, Clive Mason/Getty Images, Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto, Mark Thompson/Getty Images; Design: Meech Robinson/The Athletic