Marko hits out at Lawson's aggressive style and for giving Perez the middle finger

Reflecting on the collision between Liam Lawson and Sergio Perez, Red Bull motorsport advisor Dr Helmut Marko has hit out at the aggressive driving style of the New-Zealander, blaming the RB driver for the crash with Sergio Perez.

Perez endured a very difficult race weekend in front of his home crowd after failing to make it out of Q1 which saw him start from only P18 on the grid.

The Mexican then failed to start from his grid box for which he received a five-second penalty. Afterwards, Perez showed very strong pace and impressive race craft in the early stages of the race and managed to climb up the order to P11 by Lap 13.

Perez then closed in on RB driver Liam Lawson, but the two drivers crashed on Lap 18 as they were fighting for P10. The New-Zealander ran wide at Turn 4, and the battle ended in a considerable contact at Turn 5, leaving Perez with major sidepod and floor damage.

Speaking of Perez's incident-filled weekend to Austrian TV channel ORF, Red Bull motorsport advisor Dr Helmut Marko added: “You can’t talk about his performance because his car was so damaged.

“So there was no way he could drive on the limit. And also the performance of the car was terrible. I would say that we could make the car work on the hard tyre or the medium tyre.

“And then Checo, with the collision with Lawson it was a big damage. He lost about 60 points of downforce. So the car was far from competitive.”

The Austrian insisted that Lawson was to blame for the incident: “[It was] an unnecessary collision, where I see Lawson as being more to blame.

When the pair met on the track again on Lap 41, Lawson managed to overtake Perez easily as the Mexican was driving on older tyres and more importantly with a heavily-damaged car. The RB driver gave the Mexican his middle finger for showing his assessment regarding their earlier get-together.

Reflecting on Lawson's aggressive driving style, Marko told Viaplay: "Checo was also very upset with Lawson. So I think we have to sit down and discuss it here.

“But we know Lawson is a very tough racer. He’s very difficult to overtake. But it shouldn’t be within, not team-mates, but with sister teams. There should be more respect.”

Following his second F1 race of 2024, Lawson labelled his Mexico City Grand Prix as frustrating, claiming that the Faenza-based outfit could not extract the full potential of the car due to spending most of the race in traffic.

“A frustrating race, not the result we wanted. With the speed we had this weekend we could have scored points. It’s very disappointing to come away with nothing this weekend, especially when we had a package that was strong.

"We needed that clean air and unfortunately spent the whole race behind the gear box of another car. We had incidents all throughout and we tried the strategy that worked last week but it just didn’t work today. We’ll learn from that, and we’ll try and do a better job next week.”

RB team boss Laurent Mekies echoed Lawson's words, blaming traffic for the New Zealender's difficult race in Mexico City.

“Liam was on an inverted strategy to try and jump some of the cars ahead of us. He had a strong first stint and some good fights throughout the race, but it did not really work for him, as he found a lot of traffic in the second part of the race.

"The contact with Colapinto pretty much ended any slight chance to fight for points," the Frenchman concluded.