Sergio Perez: ‘I looked in the mirror and thought, what am I doing here?’

Exclusive interview: The Mexican driver discusses the difficulty of moving to Oxford at 17, his role in Max Verstappen’s maiden world title, and why he can play more than second fiddle at Red Bull this season

Sergio Perez in F1 testing in Bahrain (Getty)

Back in 2007, there were times when Sergio Perez would stare into the long mirror in his accommodation in Oxford and wonder whether he’d made a huge mistake. He was 17 years old, chasing a “crazy dream” that could only be realised thousands of miles from his home in Mexico, but he was bitterly homesick and the price of a long-distance phone call meant he rarely spoke to his parents more than once a week.

“Sometimes, you just look at yourself and think ‘what am I doing here?’ I came [to England] fully on my own and I didn’t know when I was going to go back. I would call my mum when I was really struggling and she would just say to come home,” Perez says, laughing and opening his arms as if she were trying to give him a hug. “But I always really believed in myself. I wanted to give it a go not knowing where I would end up. I told her, I’m not going to come back until I’m a world champion.”

Perez is now 32, not quite a world champion but still just as determined in that pursuit. For all that he suffered off the track that year, his dominance in the British Formula Three Championship helped fast-track him to the heights of Formula One and Sunday’s season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix will be Perez’s 214th race start at the pinnacle of the sport. It is a remarkable feat of consistency, spanning over a decade and four different teams, and would ordinarily render him something of a veteran. Instead, the consensus is that Perez is now only approaching his peak.

From at one stage fearing he may be without a team entirely, Perez was signed on a one-year contract to provide healthy competition to Max Verstappen at Red Bull last season. In the end, he played a pivotal role in ensuring his teammate pipped Lewis Hamilton to the world championship, costing the Briton around eight seconds as they duelled and Perez doggedly refused to surrender the lead in Abu Dhabi. “I was happy that it made a difference for Max because this is my team and this is the shirt that I’m wearing and I will do anything for it,” he says.

It was the first time Perez had been in a car truly capable of challenging for the title and he admits it was “tricky” adapting to a “very different team with a very different way of working”. He is more settled now, with his contract extended for another season, and remains adamant his “main target is to be a world champion” himself. “I think I’m just going to get stronger now,” he says. “I’m working for it every day. So hopefully this year I can have another gear.”

Perez was supposed to have that opportunity back in 2013 when he replaced Hamilton at McLaren. He had impressed in two seasons at Sauber, with his ability to battle aggressively through the field guiding him to three podium finishes. McLaren were meant to have the pace to rival Red Bull but instead languished way behind, with Jenson Button only faring marginally better than Perez in a torrid season. “It was definitely a bad image for my career,” Perez says. “It took me a lot of years to prove that I deserved the opportunity at a top team again.”

He joined Force India, later renamed Racing Point, where he was always steady if unspectacular, but after seven years, it was confirmed mid-season in 2020 that Perez would be unceremoniously replaced by Sebastian Vettel at its conclusion. It was another cruel blow, with Perez enjoying one of his best seasons to date despite some wretched luck and missing two races with Covid, but that setback soon transformed into another triumph of resilience.

Perez (left) holds up Lewis Hamilton at the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix (Getty)

As the season was drawing to a close, with Perez still without a team for the following season, he came from 18th to win a chaotic Sakhir Grand Prix. It was his first race win in 190 starts – a record that had brought so much frustration and was broken by tears of joy on the podium in Bahrain. “It’s something you dream about since you’re a child, knowing how it feels, being on that top step,” he says. “It was a very special moment, especially for me, because it took so long.”

Less than two weeks later, Perez had signed his contract with Red Bull. It has been a constant pattern throughout his career that his dream has always had to be wrestled into reality rather than smoothly coming true, and few could accuse Perez of not earning his place the hard way. When he looks in the mirror now, though, he doesn’t count the sacrifices he’s made. “I know what I have done, what my family has done, and we’re proud,” he says. “But I’m not the type of guy to run around screaming about it, that’s just boring. Everyone has their own story, their own life, and at the end of the day, we’re here because we want to be here: to race; to compete; to deliver. I’ve had a fantastic career and I still want to achieve a lot more in this sport.”