Perez praises Verstappen: 'We have got to appreciate what Max is doing'

"We have got to appreciate what Max is doing," Perez explained, before adding: "He’s driving at an extreme level at the moment. I think the ability that he has to perform at his 100% every single weekend, no matter which conditions he's driving at. It's quite hard to see as his teammate, it doesn't really matter what's happened, whether we have a good margin or bad margins or the car is becoming difficult."

Despite finding it hard to compete with the level Verstappen is at on a race-to-race basis, the Mexican ended by handing more praise to his teammate, saying, "he's been able to extract 100% out of him, out of the car pretty much every weekend."

Perez confident of a good result at Monza

When asked about how much confidence he has coming into the weekend in Italy, Perez gave a short and sweet answer of 'a lot,' before explaining how a strong qualifying result can help him come away with a 'great result' on Sunday. He said: "I really really want to have a straightforward weekend. I think this new tyre rule for qualifying makes it quite challenging as we saw in Hungary, so having a strong qualifying is key around this place. Hopefully, we can come away with a great result."

However, Perez gave a reserved response when questioned about how much of a margin the Red Bull's RB19 car will have over its competitors on the grid. "It's very hard to predict. In some races, we felt like we were going to have quite a bit of margin, and then it turns out to be really close, and then for others, we don't really think that we're going to be that far off so it's quite difficult to predict. I think this is a very different circuit to anything we've done before so it will be very interesting," he explained.