Checo Pérez stopped being a Red Bull driver in F1, it is official
After a complicated 2024, the Mexican driver is left out of the team’s project and his place will be taken by Liam Lawson
The driver Sergio Pérez and Red Bull Racing They have announced that the Mexican will leave that Formula 1 team and will not compete for them in the 2025 season.
New Zealand driver Liam Lawson will be announced in the coming days as the Mexican’s replacement.
Pérez, who had a very difficult year and finished eighth in the Constructors’ Championship, had been negotiating the next steps of his contract since the start of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix weekend.
While the offer of an ambassadorship was on the table, Perez opted to abandon his contract with Red Bull entirely.
Perez had signed a two-year contract extension in May this year, but his spiraling form led Red Bull to look at other options.
Doing so will allow him to pursue racing opportunities elsewhere in 2025, although there are no more seats available in Formula 1. His next steps are unclear.
Formula 1 has an agreement in principle with General Motors to add a Cadillac team to the grid in 2026.
Given Pérez’s enormous popularity in the North American market, he could well be the prime candidate to have a chance there.
With this, the four-season relationship ends Checo Pérez as starting driver with Red Bull and where he was Max Verstappen’s teammate in winning two Constructors’ World Championships (2022 and 2023) and helped his teammate win four Drivers’ World Championships in 2021 and 2024, mainly the first, where the Mexican’s duels with Lewis Hamilton They were crucial for the Dutchman to take the title in the end.
In the 90 Grand Prix that the Mexican Perez he was a pilot Red Bull He won five times, was on the podium 29 times, added 932 points and got three pole positions, but his greatest achievement was having achieved the runner-up world championship for drivers in 2023, which the energy drink team achieved for the first time in its history. make 1-2 in the general table.
Checo Pérez is the longest-lived Mexican driver and with the best results in history and the only one who has been world runner-up for drivers and world champion for constructors as a starter.
Also, in these four years, Czech Perez He scored eight fast laps and 13 abandonments, either due to mechanical failure or an accident.
Checo Pérez suffered in 2024 with a car that was very complicated to drive and with which even his teammate Verstappen suffered at least half a season. This brought a strong crisis of results that led to the Mexican failing to get on the podium in the last 18 races of the calendar, falling to eighth place in the Drivers’ Championship and only adding 152 points, particularly only 45 from the Grand Prix. from Monaco, where his bad streak began.
Perez had started the 2024 season with very high marks after being second in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Japan, in addition to getting on the podium in third place in China, but then there were very important exits at Red Bull, mainly that of the star designer, Adrian Newey, and the development of the RB20 car began to get complicated.
Red Bull had announced on June 4, 2024, the renewal of the contract with Czech Perezbut they decided to terminate said agreement after evaluating the Mexican’s performance.
Christian Horner had said that they would talk to Czech so that a decision could be made about their future and that they needed a driver who was closer to Max Verstappen, who despite the internal problems and the very complicated car managed to win 9 races in 2024.
