Horner admits "being Max's teammates is the toughest drive" in Formula One
Reflecting on the current struggles of Sergio Perez, Red Bull team boss Christian Horner reckoned that the role of being Max Verstappen's team-mate is a hugely difficult task to handle.
Having struggled for pure pace in the majority of the qualifying sessions this year, Sergio Perez's future at Red Bull has been hanging in the balance for long months.
The Guadalajara-born driver joined Red Bull in 2021, and helped his team-mate Max Verstappen win his first championship title that year, playing a pivotal role at the title-deciding 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
However, he has failed to deliver a consistent performance over the last couple of years. Perez has won five races with Red Bull, and finished second in the Drivers' Championship last year, but he has endured periods during which he simply struggled for outright pace in qualifying.
After a strong start to the season, Red Bull elected to extend his contract by a further two years which would see Perez race for the Milton Keynes-based outfit until at least the end of the 2026 F1 season. However, the Mexican struggled for pace after his contract extension.
Asked about the difficulty of being the teammate of Max Verstappen at Red Bull, team boss Christian Horner reckons that it is an immensely tough role to handle.
"Well, I think probably being Max's teammates, the toughest drive in Formula 1, because he sets such a high standard, such a high bar. And his performances are just relentless.
"So anybody sat in the car alongside him has got to have tremendous strength of character and have the ability obviously to work within a team and be able to focus on themselves and to a degree almost ignore what's going on in the other car because I think that's where mentally, it becomes incredibly tough, as we've seen with many of the greats.
"I'm sure when you work with Michael Schumacher or Ayrton Senna previously, teammates had a similarly hard job. And Max now joins that elite group of people. It's as simple as that," concluded Horner.
