F1: Red Bull To Decide On Perez's Future Post Summer Break 

Red Bull is in the lead of the F1 world championship for the first time since 2013 and its lead driver Max Verstappen is also leading the driver's championship for the first time in his career. But what about Sergio Perez who joined only recently from Racing Point? His start to the season has been sketchy, as he is still adapting to the car. His performances during the race have been impressive apart from Imola, though he has been made to look better thanks to the Mercedes number Valtteri Bottas who has retired twice this season.

Perez who was hired on a one year contract has some ways to go, but with the data that has come out, he hasn't been spectacularly better than the folks who preceded him the second Red Bull, Alex Albon, Pierre Gasly and Daniil Kvyat. They even made the decision to hire Perez when he was out of contract and out of a seat in December.

The Perez and Verstappen combination is amongst the strongest driver pairings on the grid

Red Bull's mercuric advisor Helmut Marko has revealed right now the team hasn't given thought to contract renewals. There is a fear that Red Bull could ditch Perez again at the end of the year, and promote Yuki Tsunoda from the junior AlphaTauri team who has been earmarked as a protege and a future world champion. However, the problem for Red Bull is that Tsunoda has not set the stage on fire in the last couple of races and was handily beaten by Pierre Gasly whom Red Bull had demoted in favour of Albon only two years ago.

"We'll start thinking about it in the summer at the earliest," Marko told Motorsport.com's sister publication Formel1.de in an exclusive interview.

"We are a very sought-after partner on the driver market. I don't think a driver will enter into negotiations or a deal with any other team until he has tried to come to an agreement with us. We are now fully focused on the world championship, and we don't see any problem there in terms of who will be Max Verstappen's teammate next year. It will certainly be a competitive guy. But there is still time," added the Austrian.

Marko was also full of praise for Perez who demonstrated incredible ability to jump to P4 despite starting from P5 in Monaco, on a race track that's notoriously difficult to overtake on. Perez was helped by the retirements of Charles Leclerc and Valtteri Bottas who qualified in P1 and P3.

Pierre Gasly finished just 0.1s behind Esteban Ocon taking the final point in the Spanish GP

"Let's start with the positive, that's the race performance. It's very good, sometimes at Max's level. He proved that in Monte Carlo when we went for the overcut. That was three or four laps where he drove the fastest laps overall, with already very used tyres. So the race pace is there. The area where we're still lacking is in qualifying. We need to see an improvement there," he added.

Marko also said that he wasn't even worried about Gasly leaving the team as he had a contract for 2 years which included either Red Bull or AlphaTauri. Gasly expressed his disappointment at being demoted in 2019 in the Drive To Survive documentary and then in 2020 went on to win the race at Monza in the weaker AlphaTauri.

In recent times, he had been linked to the French Alpine team, considering he's also French, but that would also mean the exit of another Frenchman Estaban Ocon who currently is outperforming 2-time works champion Fernando Alonso who returned to F1 after a hiatus of 2 years.