Sergio Perez did not sugarcoat it. Asked to describe his last six months driving for Red Bull, the four-time race winner reached for a word drivers almost never use about the team that pays them. “My last six months at Red Bull were very tough, even for me, when mentally I feel very strong,” Perez said. “They were very, very tough, and I would say toxic, and I really wanted a break. So the year out came at the perfect time.”
Eighteen months later, Perez is racing again, this time for a team with zero points, a brand-new principal, and a driver lineup he helped shape from nothing. The story of how he got from one to the other says as much about Formula 1’s unforgiving culture as it does about one driver’s capacity to start over.
The Toxic Ending at Red Bull
Perez spent four seasons alongside Max Verstappen at Red Bull, a partnership that produced two constructors’ championships in 2022 and 2023 but also exposed him to a level of internal pressure few drivers ever experience. Verstappen won four consecutive drivers’ titles across that stretch, and every gap between the two teammates got measured, publicized, and used against Perez whenever his form dipped.
“The pressure on everyone internally,” Perez said, reflecting on those years. “We had too much success. So people got bored, and they were fighting each other. But they were four fantastic years.” The contradiction sits right there in his own words: a run he calls fantastic in one breath and toxic in the next, both true at once, the way most difficult chapters in a career actually are.
He revealed on the podcast Beyond The Grid that Red Bull repeatedly suggested his on-track struggles stemmed from psychological issues, pushing him toward outside help he eventually sought out. “I sought outside help because they pushed me for it. At Red Bull, it was funny; every time you didn’t deliver, there were some mental issues,” Perez said. He described the experience of surviving that environment in blunt terms: only someone mentally strong, he said, could get through having your whole team turn on you publicly.
Red Bull replaced Perez with Liam Lawson for the 2025 season, a swap that lasted only two rounds before Lawson himself was demoted back to Racing Bulls in favor of Yuki Tsunoda. The chaos that followed Perez’s exit did little to prove the team had solved whatever problem it believed he represented, a detail not lost on a paddock that watched three different drivers cycle through the second Red Bull seat inside a single year.
A Year Away and a Real Question Mark
Perez was honest about how uncertain his own future felt once he left. “I didn’t know at that time if I wanted to come back,” he said. “When I left F1, I really thought it could be it, and I was ready for it. I’m very grateful, I wouldn’t come back at any cost.” That is not the language of a driver plotting a comeback tour. It is the language of someone who had truly made peace with walking away from the sport that had defined his adult life from the moment he arrived on the grid in 2011.
The year out gave Perez something Formula 1 rarely allows its drivers: distance. No race weekends, no debrief sheets, no engineers waiting for an explanation of a lap time. Just enough space to decide whether the sport he still loved was worth returning to under different terms, with a different team, carrying a different set of expectations than the ones that had worn him down at Red Bull.
Building Cadillac From the Back of the Grid
When Cadillac entered Formula 1 for 2026 as the sport’s newest constructor, backed by General Motors and TWG Motorsports, Perez signed on alongside former Mercedes driver Valtteri Bottas. The team represented the opposite of everything Perez had known at Red Bull. Instead of fighting for wins with a championship-caliber car, he would be building an organization from its earliest days, racing for a team that has yet to score a single point through its first eleven grands prix.
“I really feel like I’m part of this project, of this new era, building something from scratch,” Perez said. “Of course, I want to win championships and be fighting at the front. But if you don’t have that opportunity, I think Cadillac, it’s something that motivates me a lot because it’s like building a team from scratch and starting basically from last to see how far we can go together. I feel like here I’m much more than a driver.”
That last line captures what Perez says has surprised him most about the switch. At Red Bull, he was one driver in a machine built around Verstappen. At Cadillac, he says he is consulted on development priorities, strategy philosophy and the broader direction of a team still writing its own rulebook. “At the same time, they listen a lot to me on different things, on development and stuff,” he said. “Only a few drivers can get that in their careers and it’s the first time I can have this.”
Admitting the Hard Truth
None of that has translated into results the team wants, and Perez has not pretended otherwise. “I think the last few races have been a disappointment. There’s a lot of disappointment because we haven’t been developing. We haven’t been improving,” he said. “I don’t think we have improved as much as we hoped for. But the most important is we understand and we look at our processes, why it hasn’t come, why we haven’t improved in all those different areas.”
The stalled progress helped trigger Cadillac’s decision to replace team principal Graeme Lowdon with former Alpine executive director Marcin Budkowski ahead of the Dutch Grand Prix, a change Perez says he welcomes even as it adds another adjustment to an already young operation. “Obviously, I’m looking forward to work with Marcin, see his leadership and I think there’s a lot of room for improvement, not just on performance, you know, operationally, pit stops, strategy, tyres, there’s so much still,” Perez said.
Perez has already confirmed he will stay with Cadillac into 2027, calling the current two-year deal the start of a long-term commitment rather than a placeholder while he waits for a better offer elsewhere. “It was already clear when I came here. It was a two-year deal. But obviously I want this. I see this as my project and I want to be part of Cadillac for the long term,” he said, adding that the next two to three months of development decisions will shape how competitive the team starts its second season.
Finding Motivation at the Back
What strikes people who talk to Perez now is how he describes racing near the rear of the field compared to fighting for wins. “You’re still at Formula 1. You’re still at the pinnacle of the sport. You’re still working with the best engineers in the world. You are competing against the best drivers of the world, although you are far from them,” he said. He pointed to teammate Bottas, one of the grid’s most experienced racers, as proof that the internal competition still counts even when neither car is fighting for points.
Perez admitted he expected the motivation to fade once he was no longer fighting at the front. It has not. “It hasn’t been the case, I’m very happy that I’m still in Formula 1, talking the same language to my people around me,” he said, pointing to Aston Martin’s rapid rise from midfield also-ran to genuine front-runner as proof that a small gap in performance can close fast once a team finds the right direction. For a 36-year-old driver who once considered walking away for good, that possibility, however distant it looks from the back of the grid today, is enough to keep him showing up every weekend.
