What Sergio Perez and Red Bull made of his best F1 result since Miami

Sergio Perez recorded his best result since the Miami Grand Prix in May nine races ago, but he wasn’t entirely happy with how his F1 Dutch Grand Prix went.

The Red Bull driver, who has been under intense pressure to hold onto his seat for 2025 amid a string of recent dire performances, qualified fifth and finished sixth at Zandvoort.

Perez lost a place off the line to Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc but was still able to claim his best finish since taking fourth in Miami more than three months ago.

However, the Mexican was left with mixed feelings after the race, admitting Red Bull’s pace was “very weak” compared to McLaren as Lando Norris secured a crushing victory over Max Verstappen.

“I think it was, in terms of weekend progression, it has been a solid one. But I was very disappointed with the pace we had today in the race, it was something we were not expecting to have,” Perez said.

“I thought we were going to be a lot closer to the McLaren. Ferrari were a massive surprise and obviously McLaren. Yeah, plenty of stuff to understand… It was discouraging to see what McLaren can do today.”

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner believes Perez can take positives from his performance over the Zandvoort weekend.

“I thought he did a solid job. If you look at his pace in the race, it was decent,” he told media including Crash.net.

“Sainz’s pace at one point, he had the fastest lap of the whole race. But I thought Checo, started P5, finished P6, I thought that was a very solid drive by him today.

“Obviously he lost a position at the start, which was obviously a little frustrating for him. I think that actually he’ll take quite a lot of positives out of his performance here, and hopefully this puts him on a good trajectory for Monza.”

Perez ran an older-specification floor and set-up on his car, which Horner revealed had turned out to be the best direction based on his drivers’ feedback.

“We’ve run the cars in different specifications, and I think that that has actually given us quite a lot of valuable info,” Horner explained.

“I think that the driver’s feedback has been very positive into that as well, in terms of what they’re feeling from the different setups. So I think it, hopefully, now gives a real direction for the engineering group.

“I think it was clear that Checo’s race package got the better of the two. But we’ve got all 72 laps of data, across two different compounds of tyres now, to compare that info.”