There’s little to no doubt currently that Red Bull have produced the best car in the crop of 2023, having won all of the opening 4 Grands Prix this year, and the sole sprint race as well. While Red Bull may have lost out to Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc in qualifying for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the RB19 was more than capable of beating the Ferrari SF23 in race pace. With one hand on the constructor’s trophy for the season already, Red Bull is treading on the complicated path of keeping its drivers from tangling with each other.
Talking about the two drivers to Motorsport.com, Red Bull Team Principal Christian Horner said that they’re “free to race”. Talking about the title battle, he said, “Well at moment it's the two of them, there's a slight gap between the rest of the field, but there's 19 more races to go, and five sprint races. So there's a huge amount of racing and a whole variance of different circuits to go through, so it could ebb and flow between the two of them.”
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Horner also said that “there's going to be sizeable upgrades” to the entire grid when racing moves to Europe, so it will be paramount for the team to build a gap from the field, especially with reduced capacity to develop this year - thanks to Red Bull breaching the cost cap last year. Horner said should the team’s advantage over others reduce, it may re-evaluate letting its drivers race against each other. However, “as it is at the moment, they're free to race”, he added.
He also said that the team doesn’t want a replay of what happened between Ricciardo & Verstappen in 2018. “I think 2018 is fairly etched on everybody's memory in this team, and it's something we discussed this morning in the briefing, that they're free to race, but we don't want a 2018 replay; and they pushed each other as hard as they could, and it was a fine margin today that split the two of them.”
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Until the end of last year, Max Verstappen was head and shoulders above Perez almost every weekend, and Perez even lost out the second place in the 2022 driver’s championship to Leclerc. But the Mexican has been much more comfortable with the RB19 and is taking the fight to Verstappen every now and then. So much so that the pair is separated by just 6 points at the top of the table.
Perez has been living up to his nickname of ‘the king of the streets’ this season. Perez edged out Verstappen in Saudi Arabia in both qualifying and the race, and also snatched the sprint race & grand prix win in Baku away from his team-mate. However, a P5 in Australia after starting from the pitlane has put him to a small disadvantage to the Dutchman, as Verstappen has finished second to Perez in both the Saudi Arabian GP as well as the Azerbaijan GP.
