Incomprehensible that Perez gets so much praise from Christian Horner

"I thought he did a 'solid job'," Horner revealed after the Dutch Grand Prix. "If you look at his pace in the race, it was solid. If you looked at Sainz's pace, he had the fastest lap of the race at one point. I think it was a solid race from him, started from P5 and finished in P6."

The story is familiar by now. Christian Horner likes to praise Perez after a Grand Prix, even if it was a misfire. While Perez did not deliver a misfire at Zandvoort, you cannot speak of a 'solid job' either. If one driver shows that a second place is possible in qualifying and the race, you can hardly say that sixth place is a good result by the other driver.

Not at all if you zoom in on performance. Perez, not for the first time this year, was almost four-tenths slower in qualifying than Verstappen. A fifth place compared to second place compared to Verstappen. In the race, it was no different. Perez got off to a poor start, lost a place and never regained it in the race.

What did Christian Horner think of Perez at Zandvoort?

Perez was lucky that the Mercedes drivers burned up their tyres, with George Russell falling back after his second stop. Perez drove quietly to sixth place behind the two Ferraris. While Verstappen even managed to keep one McLaren behind him, the strongest team at Zandvoort, Perez only kept the much slower Mercedes behind him.

Surprised by Horner's initial reaction, GPblog therefore asked at Zandvoort if Horner was not surprised that Perez was unable to finish ahead of the Ferrari's. Horner clearly needed more time to come up with a good answer, but eventually returned to his regular answer: "He lost a place at the start, that was frustrating of course. However, I think he can take a lot of positives from his performance and hopefully that will put him on the right track for Monza."

That regular story has been heard since the start of 2024. First, it was the reason for Perez's contract extension. Whereas someone normally gets a new contract through proven good performance, Perez was given a new contract in the hope that it would give him confidence and thus improve performance. Those better performances did not materialise for the time being. In fact, performance got so bad that there were serious question marks over his future at Red Bull during the summer break.

Perez was allowed to stay put. Why did Horner stick with Perez? Because they wanted to give him confidence so that he would start performing better again. Again hoping for better performance, rather than actually seeing better performance and rewarding that with a new contract.

Why does Sergio Perez get so much credit?

Of course, a team boss cannot knock his driver every time, but good is good and bad is bad. When you drive that far behind your teammate in the same car, you just deliver a poor performance. The pressure at Red Bull has always been very high. Gasly was ejected after six months, Alexander Albon after a year and a half. Did they really do so much worse than Perez? Of course not. So the big question is why does Perez get so much credit from Horner?

With Azerbaijan, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, there are races coming up where Perez once did well, but would good performances there suddenly make up for the whole poor season? Perez is seventh in the world drivers' championship, while his teammate leads the championship with more than double the number of points. Perez is costing his team a lot of points, but somehow there are no consequences with him. Who knows why.......