After winning all but one race in 2023, Red Bull was the favorite team to win both championships again in 2024, and their start to the season was perfect. However, as the season has progressed, multiple issues have popped up in the aggressive RB20 concept to halt Red Bull’s juggernaut. According to Helmut Marko, this aggressive approach is the reason behind Sergio Perez’s struggles this season.
Initially, the RB20 was predictable and it was easy to set up the car for a range of different circuits. However, the Milton Keynes outfit has not been able to bring effective upgrades to it to solve its rigid suspension and ride issues. While Verstappen can still handle the car to extract the most out of it, Perez has struggled massively.
“The car has become a b**ch that only Max can tame,” Marko said as per Auto Motor und Sport. Speaking about the upgrades, Marko mentioned, “They made the car more and more unpredictable. It became more and more difficult to set up and balance it.”
AUTO MOTOR UND SPORT – The engineers at Red Bull have realized they had gone overboard in their aggressive development program [of RB20]. What happened to them happened to others. The upgrade wasn’t a step forward but rather at best a side step.
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— Junaid #JB17 (@JunaidSamodien_) August 19, 2024
Even team principal Christian Horner has claimed that the performance window of the car has become smaller. Relatively, the Mercedes W15 has taken an opposite trajectory to gain better stability in both low-speed and high-speed corners.
That is why, Perez has been struggling compared to the start of the season when he was consistently close behind the Dutchman on the podium. In fact, the Mexican’s performance has taken such a big hit that Red Bull was on the brink of replacing him.
Did Liberty Media play a part in saving Perez’s Red Bull seat?
Red Bull lost a huge chunk of points to McLaren in the constructors’ championship as the season approached its halfway mark. And that’s no surprise considering Perez has only scored 29 points since the Miami Grand Prix.
Marko had said on several occasions that Red Bull would be forced to decide the 34-year-old’s future if his form continued to spiral down. After the Belgian Grand Prix, where Perez finished seventh after starting second on the grid, it seemed that he would lose his seat during the summer break.
However, in the following week, Red Bull announced that they were retaining Perez for the rest of the 2024 season and any decisions regarding his replacement had been postponed to 2025.
After this development, reports surfaced that Liberty Media had a role to play in saving the Mexican’s seat. These reports suggested that Liberty doesn’t want to lose revenue on the Mexican GP, for which Perez attracts a huge number of Mexican fans.
According to what was reported in an article by https://t.co/NxnzmpiMKl journalist Ralf Bach, Liberty Media intervened directly to ‘advise’ Red Bull not to get rid of Sergio Perez during the season. https://t.co/0RwMebG5r9
— Junaid #JB17 (@JunaidSamodien_) July 31, 2024
However, Red Bull has since confirmed that Liberty Media did not play any role in their deliberation about Perez’s fate. Marko believes that once the issues with the RB20 go away, the #11 driver will automatically improve as well. For the same, the Milton Keynes outfit is planning to revert to some of the older spec parts of the car after the Italian GP.
