Sergio Perez Declares Himself One of the Best in F1 After Rebuilding From His Red Bull Exit

• Sergio Perez says he is “one of the best” drivers in Formula 1 again, insisting he has fully recovered from the confidence damage of his Red Bull exit.
• The Mexican spent most of 2025 out of the sport before signing a multi-year deal with Cadillac, and has comfortably outperformed team-mate Valtteri Bottas in a slow car.
• Perez says jumping into a Ferrari and being up to speed within ten laps convinced him the problem at Red Bull was his circumstances, not his talent.

There is a particular kind of doubt that follows a driver out of a top team. It is not the noise from outside, the pundits and the social media verdicts. It is the quiet voice on the inside, the one that asks whether the struggle was really the car, or whether it was you. Sergio Perez spent the back end of his Red Bull career living with that voice, and he has spent his comeback season trying to silence it.

This week, for the first time, he sounded like a man who finally has. Speaking to select media including RacingNews365, the 36-year-old made a claim that would have seemed almost unthinkable eighteen months ago. He believes he is back among the very best on the grid, and he is no longer shy about saying so.

“Well, obviously, when you look at my last six months at Red Bull, you wouldn’t think that I’m one of the best out there,” Perez said. “But when you understand the circumstances I was in at that point, and the people that understand performance at the end of the day, when you see the level of performance that I’m putting in with my team, you realise that I’m one of the best out there.”

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How the doubt set in

To understand why the claim carries weight, you have to remember how it ended at Red Bull. Perez parted ways with the team at the close of the 2024 season after a brutal second half of the year, one in which he scored just 44 points across the final 17 rounds. For a driver who had won grands prix and fought at the front, the collapse was painful and very public. The car had drifted away from him, the results dried up, and the questions grew louder.

He has been candid about the toll it took. The slump did not just cost him a seat, it chipped away at the belief that any elite athlete depends on. Perez admits he walked away wondering whether he had simply lost his edge.

“Obviously it kind of hurt my confidence because, when you start to struggle the way I struggled in my last period at Red Bull, it hurts your confidence, you know,” he explained. “It makes you feel like, ‘Maybe I’m the problem, and maybe I’m not as good as I used to be.’ But it’s all about the circumstances around you.”

A year away, then a leap of faith

Rather than rush into the first available drive, Perez chose to step back. He spent the bulk of 2025 away from motorsport, a deliberate pause that gave him space to reset before deciding whether he still wanted the fight. When he did return, it was with Cadillac, Formula 1’s newest team, on a multi-year deal that signalled both sides were committed for the long haul.

On paper it looked like a risk. Cadillac arrived with one of the slowest packages in the field, the inevitable reality of a brand-new operation finding its feet. Perez has finished no higher than 14th across the opening seven rounds. Yet the raw results tell only a fraction of the story. Race by race, his pace has sharpened, and he has been comfortably the stronger half of the garage against the vastly experienced Valtteri Bottas.

For a driver rebuilding his self-belief, beating a respected team-mate in equal machinery is worth more than any headline finishing position. It is the cleanest measure the sport offers, and Perez has been winning that internal contest week after week.

His value to Cadillac runs deeper than qualifying gaps. A new team needs a driver who can tell the engineers where the car is hurting, who can drag a tricky package up to a position it has no business reaching, and who can keep the garage calm when results are thin. Those are exactly the qualities Perez built over more than a decade in the sport, and they are the qualities a start-up operation leans on most heavily in its first season. He has become the steady hand around which a young team is learning to walk.

The Ferrari moment that turned it around

The turning point, in Perez’s telling, was not even in a Cadillac. Asked when he started to feel like himself again, he pointed to a private test where he climbed into a Ferrari and rediscovered, almost instantly, the speed he feared he had lost.

“And when I jumped in the Ferrari and was already up to speed within 10 laps, despite not driving anything, I was like, ‘You know, it must have been the circumstances I was in,'” Perez said. “Then, over the last three or four races, the level of performance that I’ve been able to put together in qualifying and race pace makes me feel like the speed has always been there.”

That realisation, he says, lifted a burden he had been carrying for the better part of a year. The speed had not gone anywhere. It had simply been buried under a set of conditions he could not control.

“There are a lot of circumstances that, as a driver, you cannot control when you are struggling with so many different factors,” he added. “So it’s a great boost of confidence and a great example to a lot of drivers who go through it, you know.”

A message to every driver who has been written off

What makes Perez’s comeback compelling is not the lap times. It is the way he frames it as something bigger than his own career. He talks about being an example to other drivers who have hit the same wall, who have started to believe the harshest verdicts about themselves. In a sport that discards talent quickly and rarely looks back, that is a rare note of solidarity.

“So, in that regard, I’m very pleased I came back and proved it to myself,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s just a game with myself as a driver, that you want to have that confidence in you. You require the right circumstances for your talent to be able to show itself.”

That perspective did not come cheaply. It was bought with a public unravelling, a season on the sidelines, and the slow work of climbing back into a car that could only ever finish at the back. Plenty of drivers in his position would have stayed retired, content to protect a reputation rather than risk it again. Perez chose the harder road, and he chose it knowing the car he was returning to would not flatter him.

There is a maturity in that framing that the younger Perez might not have reached. He is no longer chasing validation from the outside. The proof he needed was personal, and by his own account he has it. The Cadillac may be slow, the points may be scarce, and the grand prix wins may belong to a different chapter of his life. But the man driving the car has stopped doubting himself, and for Sergio Perez that may be the most important result of the season.

Whether the wider paddock agrees with his bold self-assessment is almost beside the point. The driver who left Red Bull asking whether he was the problem has returned with an answer, and he is delivering it with the kind of conviction that only comes from having tested it the hard way.

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Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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