Marko piles pressure on Perez with ‘up to him now’ verdict amid slump

While teammate Max Verstappen dominated the Qatar Grand Prix, Perez endured another weekend to forget. First, he could only qualify 13th for Sunday’s main race on Friday, before he was caught up in a three-car collision in the following day's sprint race. 

Things did not improve on Sunday for Perez, who was forced into a pit lane start after Red Bull elected to change his power unit after he picked up extensive damage in Saturday’s crash. 

Perez recovered through the field but picked up a trio of time penalties for exceeding track limits which relegated him to 10th place, meaning he left Losail with just a single point to his name. 

Over the course of the weekend, the Mexican saw his lead over Lewis Hamilton in the battle for second in the drivers’ championship shrink to 30 points. 

“The gap [between Verstappen and Perez] is simply too big at the moment because second place in the World Championship is also at risk now,” Marko told ORF after Sunday’s race. 

Despite holding a valid contract for 2024, Marko suggested that Perez’s position at Red Bull is “entirely up to him now”. 

“In general we want to implement the contractual situation, which lasts until 2024. And that’s entirely up to him now,” Marko continued. 

“But then we have three relatively good drivers in AlphaTauri.”

Daniel Ricciardo has been tipped as Red Bull’s first choice to replace Perez, either during 2024 itself or at the end of the year, if Perez fails to improve his performances. 

Ricciardo’s AlphaTauri teammate Yuki Tsunoda is also vying for a Red Bull seat, while Liam Lawson is waiting in the wings for a full-time opportunity after his impressive cameos as a stand-in for the injured Ricciardo. 

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said he will sit down with Perez after his “horrible weekend” in Qatar. 

"Checo has had a bit of a shocker of a race. He's had a horrible weekend - the incident on Saturday and unfortunately the three penalties in the race,” Horner told Sky. 

"Without those penalties, he would be a lot further up the points scoring on a day Lewis didn't score, so a missed opportunity to really try and cement that second place.

"We just need to try and get that form that he showed at the beginning of the season back. We know he's got it within him.

"Nothing has really fundamentally changed that much. He's got into a bit of a spiral and he needs to put the brakes on that, reset and use this period, the two weeks to come back in Austin, another Sprint weekend, and really attack it, do the best he can and extract the most out of himself."