To be or not to be 'downdated' at Red Bull? Perez reveals

Suddenly there was a new word in the F1 paddock: 'Downdates'. Helmut Marko, Red Bull Racing's external advisor, said in the Austrian media that the team had implemented 'downdates', which seemed to imply that previous updates would be taken back off the RB20 for the Dutch Grand Prix. Max Verstappen, when asked, said there was no question of that. But Sergio Perez contradicted that again.

In recent months, Perez has found it difficult to steer Red Bull's quirky car around the track. Speaking at Zandvoort, the Mexican revealed, "I cannot go too much in detail, but lots of my struggles have been in that direction. It's hard to explain the amount of detail, but it's not like in the beginning of the year, I was a much better driver than I am now. So certainly there has been some things that didn't go my way, that were hurting me more, and we were probably not extracting the maximum out of the car in that regard."

Perez: 'Team took the wrong turn'

And so there would be 'downdates' - the opposite of updates; Parts that were only put on Perez and Verstappen's cars in Hungary but disappeared before Zandvoort. A sign that the team's hoped-for improvements were actually getting fewer and fewer. So, although Verstappen denied this, Perez seemed to say in the North Holland resort that there was a grain of truth in Marko's words after all.

"I think it's clear now where we are with the car. I think it's something that I also want to keep within the team, the level of detail, and we will be working on it. I mean, you will see obviously what we going to be doing with the cars, but it's something that will stay with the team, but certainly we've taken somewhere a turn that wasn't right," Perez was critical of the development process of late.

This article has been written in collaboration with Matt Gretton

Want more Formula 1? Then follow GPblog on our various social media channels!

X | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube