Sergio Perez certain 'something's going on' as Red Bull F1 future under threat
Sergio Perez admitted Formula 1 was "no longer fun" at the height of his struggles this season.
The Mexican began 2023 with two wins from the first four races and looked a credible threat to Max Verstappen in the title race. But no victories followed after the Dutchman raced from ninth to beat pole-sitter Perez in Miami in early May.
His spirit broken, Perez embarked on a wretched run of qualifying form from which he never really recovered. And the nadir came at the Qatar Grand Prix when Verstappen sealed the title and his team-mate limped to 10th place, well over a minute down the road.
Afterwards, the 33-year-old spent several days on the Red Bull simulator trying to figure out what was wrong. And when asked why he had waited that long to do so, he explained: "Because Qatar was really the worst weekend I remember in a while, probably my worst weekend ever in the sport.
"It was such a bad weekend that I really felt like, 'I cannot be this bad, there's something that's going on'. When you have these back-to-back races, I feel like sometimes there is not enough time to really go through it all. So, I felt like we really had to take a bit of time to make sure that we understood which way we were going.
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"Obviously, we had a deficit within the car set-up that we were playing around [with] weekend by weekend and we were just not able to progress through it. But once we managed to get on top of that, we understood a lot of things that we were trying to compensate for.
"And that just basically meant that we were not just not doing things right. I think that has been really, really good on our side. I mean, it was bad that it happened but in a way, it was really good because it really strengthened our team quite a lot.
"I was having some weekends that were so difficult that they were not fun. I'm here because I still love what I'm doing and I'm here because I still have a lot of fun, a lot of enjoyment. And that was my main focus, that we really need things to turn them around. I had some really difficult times in a few months, let's put it that way."
His slump has, predictably, led to plenty of speculation over his future. Red Bull would not be short of potential replacements should they decide to make a change, while it has even been suggested in some quarters that the disappointment might even trigger Perez to walk away from F1 altogether.
But he is clear that is not the plan. He added: "Obviously, that would have been the easiest route because it was very tough at times. But I'm not the type of guy that at this stage of my career will be giving up and be willing to finish my career like that. It's not something that I ever considered doing.
"I'm aware of the responsibility I have and I'm not the sort of guy that will blame people around me for the results. At the end of the day I took responsibility for it and I had to turn around the situation quite a lot."
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