As Formula 1 powers towards the mid-season break, rumours rise and speculation mounts about drivers who may not return after the summer recess.
Daniel Ricciardo, out of contract and still scratching to find the sizzling form that made him one of the sport’s biggest stars only a few years ago, is the name dripping from everyone’s lips.
That’s especially true if the lips belong to Helmut Marko, who got the paddock buzzing with the proclamation that Red Bull reserve driver Liam Lawson would be in Ricciardo’s RB seat “soon”.
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Whispers of Ricciardo’s imminent demise intensified when both Red Bull Racing principal Christian Horner and RB CEO Peter Bayer notably danced around the question of a mid-season switch-out for the F1 veteran during a press conference at the Austrian Grand Prix.
What happened next, though, should serve to sharpen focus on the debate.
For the third week in a row Ricciardo was RB’s better performer, falling fractionally short of a Q3 berth and going on to score points for the second time in the last three rounds in a gutsy performance that required him to spend the race defending ahead of Pierre Gasly’s faster Alpine, a mission he executed flawlessly.
“It’s a nice feeling to fight and drive a clean race and obviously bring a couple of points home for the team when I think deep down we’ll look back at our pace and say maybe we didn’t belong in the points today,” Ricciardo reflected.
“I feel like in some parts we overachieved, and we’ll maybe give ourselves a little pat on the back.”
The story of Pérez’s race, meanwhile, couldn’t be further removed from Ricciardo’s afternoon of overperformance.
The Mexican veteran put in one of his worst weekends of the year at a race held in Red Bull’s home country at a circuit owned by and named after Red Bull.
Pérez made his second consecutive Q3 appearance since Shanghai-Miami in April-May but could muster only eighth and a whopping 0.888 seconds adrift of the pole-getting Max Verstappen.
The deficit was partially explained by him having no new soft tyres at his disposal, though that was because he needed to use all four new sets just to ensure he made it into the top 10 to begin with.
Using his fastest new-soft time reduces the margin to a still enormous 0.830 seconds.
That’s a considerable gap given Spielberg is F1’s briefest lap. If you were to extrapolate the difference to a 90-second lap to better compare it to the rest of the season, Pérez’s deficit would shake out at a massive 1.161 seconds.
Things got only worse in the race, in which he finished seventh behind Nico Hülkenberg, whose Haas is in a different league to Pérez’s RB20.
Verstappen, meanwhile, crashed out of the battle of the lead, picked up a puncture, limped back to pit lane for new tyres, copped a 10-second penalty and still finished two places ahead.
Yes, Pérez had damage from his first-lap collision, but this extenuating circumstance does little to change the overall picture of his weekend.
Their seasons started in opposing fashions, with Ricciardo lacking consistency while Pérez flew.
But as contract crunch time approaches in Formula 1, the identity of the weakest link in the Red Bull chain has clearly changed.
‘I rest my case’ – Max driving unfairly | 05:29
SERGIO PÉREZ IS HAVING A MARE OF A SEASON
Pérez’s Austria shocker brings him to some truly horrific season statistics relative to Verstappen.
Some notes on the data in this article.
A differential ranking rates a driver relative to their teammate. A ranking between 1 and 10 means a driver is performing better than their teammate; a ranking between 11 and 20 means they’re performing worse. If a driver is ranked 1st, their teammate is ranked 20th.
Sprint qualifying sessions and sprint races are not included in the averages.
Oliver Bearman’s one-off appearance is not included in any rankings.
Sergio Pérez season averages
Qualifying result: 7.3 average
Qualifying differential: 5.6 places behind Verstappen (rank: 20th)
Time differential: 0.486 seconds behind Verstappen (rank: 20th)
Race result: 4.6 average
Race differential: 2.9 places behind Verstappen (rank: 19th)
Points: 119 points behind Verstappen (outscored 2.01:1; rank: 17th)
For reference, his race differential to Verstappen is better than only Logan Sargeant’s 4.17 places to Alex Albon.
Only Sargeant (scoreless), Lance Stroll (2.41:1) and Kevin Magnussen (2.80:1) are outscored by their teammates at a higher rate.
It’s bad. But it gets worse.
Perez’s form downturn in the last five rounds has been dire, with Austria just the latest chapter in his 2024 decline.
Sergio Pérez averages, last five rounds
Qualifying result: 12.2 average
Qualifying differential: 9.8 places behind Verstappen (rank: 20th)
Time differential: 0.737 seconds behind Verstappen (rank: 20th)
Race result: 7.7 average
Race differential: 3.2 places behind Verstappen (rank: 20th)
Points: 86 points behind Verstappen (outscored 6.74:1; rank: 19th)
Only the scoreless Sargeant has prevented Pérez from sweeping all last-place differential rankings over the last five rounds.
He’s being left behind on the points table too, which will sting mostly keenly in Red Bull Racing’s constructors title defence.
Points scored in the last five rounds
1. Max Verstappen: 101 points
2. George Russell: 74 points
3. Lando Norris: 73 points
4. Oscar Piastri: 71 points
5. Lewis Hamilton: 58 points
6. Charles Leclerc: 52 points
7. Carlos Sainz: 52 points
8. Sergio Pérez: 15 points
…
12. Daniel Ricciardo: 6 points
Yes, Verstappen is a generational talent against whom good drivers will look ordinary.
Yes, there have been extenuating circumstances to some of Pérez’s poor results.
But it’s impossible to look at the above figures and not conclude that for the last two months Pérez has been the worst performing teammate in the competition.
‘You compromise your reputation’ | 01:47
RICCIARDO ON THE RISE
It’s incongruous, then, that Ricciardo is the man most under pressure in the Red Bull program.
There’s no question the Aussie’s season start was underwhelming and well below what was expected of him if he was to recapture his drive at Red Bull Racing — and that was the purpose of him getting into that car.
The impact of his struggles with the car was heightened by the double blow of Pérez’s strong opening rounds and Tsunoda stepping up in both consistency and maturity.
Pérez was re-signed. Tsunoda was re-signed. Suddenly Ricciardo looked vulnerable in the ruthless Red Bull line-up.
Since then, however, the stories have dramatically reversed.
As we’ve seen above, Pérez’s form has nosedived in the five grands prix since he put pen to paper.
Ricciardo, however, has finally looked as though he’s gaining traction at RB.
Having been easily covered by Tsunoda through most of the first quarter of the season, the Australian appears to be wresting back the upper hand.
Daniel Ricciardo averages, last five rounds
Qualifying result: 11.2 average
Qualifying differential: 0.4 places behind Tsunoda (rank: 13th)
Time differential: 0.107 seconds behind Tsunoda (rank: 13th)
Race result: 11.4 average
Race differential: 1.6 places ahead of Tsunoda (rank: 6th)
Points: 1 point ahead of Tsunoda (outscoring Tsunoda 1.20:1; rank: 6th)
Notable here is that in the last five races Ricciardo has on average qualified ahead of Pérez with a car that has been something like 0.75 seconds slower per lap. They’ve both made Q3 twice, while the Mexican has been eliminated in Q1 once more than has the Australian.
While it’s still beneath the form expected of him, Ricciardo’s recent improvements have been clear — enough, you’d think, for Red Bull to want to see where his trajectory leads.
‘It’s easy to judge from the outside’ | 02:03
IS RED BULL HAVING PÉREZ REGRET?
This scenario was entirely predictable.
Pérez has endured worsening form slumps in the middle of the season ever since he joined the team. Last year’s was his worst, but with Red Bull Racing coming under serious pressure from McLaren for the constructors championship, there’s a good chance this year’s tailspin will be significantly costlier to team and driver.
It’s why it was so surprising that Pérez was offered a contract so early — reportedly around mid-May, with the announcement coming in early June.
Up to that point he’d looked impressive — as last year. Since that point he’s been woeful — as last year.
It wouldn’t have killed the team to have held on for a few weeks or even months to decide on its line-up. It would have had its pick of drivers.
It’s increasingly difficult to read the decision as anything other than a sop to the Max Verstappen camp. The tensions between the Dutch driver’s management and team boss Christian Horner threatened to destroy the team at the start of the year — and they still might.
Keeping in place the compliant and non-threatening Pérez ensured there’d be no extra front opened on that war at a time of uneasy peace.
But the acute focus on Verstappen’s needs over pure performance now looks like it’s backfiring spectacularly.
Not only is Pérez performing as badly as the hierarchy must surely have feared was possible, but Ricciardo is showing signs that he might finally be coming good just as rumours are shuffling him towards the exit.
Red Bull Racing has ended up with the weakest link in its driver line-up.
Horner defended the early contract speaking to Sky Sports at the weekend while at the same time attempting to apply some sort of pressure on Pérez to lift his game.
“Checo’s position within the team and what he’s contributed to the team warranted that [contract],” Horner argued to Sky Sports, before adding: “But of course there’s always pressure to perform, and that is irrelevant of contracts, which we’re obviously never going to go into the detail of.
“Checo knows it’s a pressure business and he knows the scrutiny that there is, particularly in a car that’s winning a lot of races and performing with the other driver the way it is.
“That’s F1, and that pressure just naturally exists on any teammate that is underdelivering. The media start asking questions and it’s very easy to lose your head.
“He’s going to need to dig deep.”
It’s somewhat disingenuous given he offered Pérez a new deal in the first place, but then it might tally with his revelation following the Mexican’s poor Canadian Grand Prix showing that the contract is actually a one-plus-one deal with all the options on the team’s side.
Evidently it’s not the safe-as-houses deal Pérez was holding out for.
There have since been whispers that he will need to fight just to start that new contract given what would be at stake on potentially both title tables if he were to continue to drag the chain.
Of course none of this changes Ricciardo’s lot
Not only is he still uncontracted, but he isn’t yet showing enough to warrant a move up to Red Bull Racing even if Pérez were still a free agent.
That said, nor is he performing so badly that he should be under threat of immediate axing, and the team deeply values his experience in building its competitiveness.
F1’s Lawrence Barretto has reported as much, writing that he’s heard Ricciardo will be given more time to prove he can be consistently quick.
Ricciardo’s objective remains unchanged. In the words of Helmut Marko, he must “show that he has Tsunoda clearly under control”.
That’s not yet out of his reach.
If he can get there, and if Pérez continues to underperform, pressure will ramp up not on the drivers but on the program to justify its increasingly conservative choices apparently blinkered by Verstappen’s needs.
It’s up to Ricciardo whether he’s the answer to that question. He may not be. The solution might be to finally give Tsunoda his shot, or it might be found in prying open the driver market and poaching a start star from elsewhere.
Whatever the case, something will have to give.
And on current form, it’s not Ricciardo who should be in the spotlight.