Sergio Perez was 24 years old, sitting in meetings with lawyers minutes before qualifying, and holding together a Formula 1 team that had not paid him in a year. He did not tell most of the paddock what was happening. He told the mechanics who serviced his car and the engineers who set it up that if nobody acted, they would lose their jobs within weeks. Eight years later, that team races as Aston Martin, and Perez is only now describing, in detail, exactly how close it came to not existing at all.
A Winding-Up Petition and a Ninety-Day Clock
Force India, the team Perez joined in 2014, traced its lineage back to Jordan Grand Prix’s 1991 founding, passing through Midland and Spyker ownership before Vijay Mallya took control in 2008. By 2018, Mallya was tangled in financial and legal troubles that had nothing to do with the racing operation but everything to do with its survival. Force India owed money across the paddock, including a full year of Perez’s own salary, and the London High Court was closing in on a resolution neither Perez nor the team wanted.
Perez’s manager, Julian Jakobi, discovered the trigger first: an unpaid supplier had filed a winding-up petition, a legal mechanism that could have forced the company into liquidation within weeks and cost every employee their job. “I had no idea about law, but I was owed some money,” Perez said on the High Performance Podcast. “They didn’t pay my salary for the entire year. We were having a bit of a delay, but then my manager told me that there was a winding-up petition from one of the suppliers that hadn’t been paid. That means they can basically shut down the company, and the whole team will lose their jobs.”
Putting the Team Into Administration Before the Clock Ran Out
Rather than wait for the winding-up petition to take effect, Perez and Jakobi moved first. They initiated Force India’s own administration process, a step that gave the team ninety days to find a buyer instead of an immediate shutdown. It was a calculated risk. Administration is designed to protect a company from creditors while a resolution is found, but it also puts a hard deadline on survival and offers no guarantee a buyer will appear in time.
“We did the whole process to put the team in administration before the winding-up petition came in, because if we didn’t, the team would have gone bankrupt,” Perez said. “All the people, all the team would have lost their jobs. So at the time it was Force India, which is now Aston Martin. Aston Martin wouldn’t exist.” Lawrence Stroll acquired the team’s assets before the ninety-day window closed, rebranding it Racing Point and eventually Aston Martin once his son Lance’s F1 program matured into the operation that races under that name today.
Legal Meetings Instead of Engineering Briefings
What made the ordeal unusual was not just the stakes but the timing. The administration process played out across a stretch of mid-season race weekends, forcing Perez to fold legal strategy into a Grand Prix schedule that normally leaves no room for anything beyond car setup and media duties. He described holding calls with lawyers in the hours before both qualifying and the race itself, at points swapping his usual pre-race engineering briefing for conversations about the team’s legal standing instead.
“You couldn’t separate it at that point because it was at a stage that was very critical,” Perez said. “So I was having meetings just before qualifying. And then before the race, instead of being with the engineers, I was in some other meetings, but I was there. I ended up trying to be the best lawyer I could be for the team, and the best driver, trying to separate when I had to jump in the car.” He also took it upon himself to reassure the staff directly, a responsibility that would not typically fall on a driver still five years from his first Grand Prix win. “I remember talking to all of the staff at one of the races, and telling them, look, I’m doing it because it’s only right for everyone here. Otherwise, you guys are gonna lose everything, all your jobs and so on,” he said.
Why Perez Is Telling This Story Now
Perez raced for the team through its Force India, Racing Point and early Aston Martin eras before Red Bull signed him in 2021, a move that produced two Abu Dhabi-clinching seasons alongside Max Verstappen before a form slump ended his second stint there at the close of last year. He spent a season away from the grid before signing with Cadillac’s new entry for 2026, a comeback he has said was driven by wanting to enjoy racing again after what he has described as a difficult final stretch at Red Bull.
Revisiting the Force India story now serves a purpose beyond nostalgia. Perez’s Red Bull exit was presented publicly around performance numbers and a seat that went to a younger driver, a version of his career that leaves out the years when he was, by his own account, the difference between an F1 team’s survival and its liquidation. The Force India rescue predates his best-known results, the Sakhir Grand Prix win in 2020 and the Monaco victories with Red Bull, but it could be the most consequential thing he did in the sport, measured by jobs saved rather than points scored.
A Driver Barely Old Enough to Understand What He Was Doing
Perez was in just his fourth full F1 season in 2018, still building the reputation for tire management and race-day patience that would eventually make him attractive to Red Bull. He had no legal training, no background in corporate insolvency, and no reason to expect that a Sunday afternoon in the cockpit would double as a crash course in UK administration law. What he had instead was a manager who recognized the danger early and a driver willing to spend race weekends split between two jobs that had nothing to do with each other.
That combination proved decisive: Force India’s ownership situation offered no clean alternative. Mallya’s legal troubles were unrelated to the racing operation, but they threatened to drag the team down with him regardless, and nobody inside the company had the standing or the urgency to act before the winding-up petition forced the issue. Perez, as one of the team’s most visible assets and someone owed a full year’s salary himself, had both motivation and standing that few others in the building possessed at that moment.
A Legacy Measured in a Grid Entry That Still Exists
Aston Martin’s current operation, backed by Stroll’s investment and building toward a Honda power unit partnership, bears little resemblance to the cash-strapped Force India squad Perez fought to keep alive in 2018. But the fact that there is a Silverstone-based team on the current grid tracing its identity back to Jordan at all owes something to a 24-year-old driver who decided to act before a legal deadline forced the decision for him.
Perez has never described the episode as heroics, calling it instead the only choice that made sense at the time given what he stood to lose alongside everyone else on the payroll. That description undersells what was actually on the line: an entire grid entry, the jobs of everyone who built and serviced the cars, and a lineage that stretches back to one of F1’s original independent constructors. Eight years later, with Perez back on the grid in Cadillac colors and Aston Martin racing on as a factory-backed operation with championship ambitions of its own, the decision he made in a handful of hurried meetings before qualifying looks less like a footnote and more like the reason either story got to continue at all.
