Perez denies Red Bull will demote him to RB next year · RaceFans

Sergio Perez has insisted he will not be relegated to Red Bull’s second Formula 1 team next year.

Red Bull motorsport director Helmut Marko has claimed the team’s shareholders will discuss Perez’s future at the team after the final race of the season. The team has previously demoted drivers from Red Bull to its junior team, now known as RB.

But Perez stated he will spend a fifth season at Red Bull in 2025. “I’ve been 14 years in the sport and I don’t speak about my contracts publicly and so I will not comment on that,” he said. “I know exactly where I am and I would not speak about it publicly.”

Asked whether he will remain at Red Bull Racing next year Perez said: “Exactly.”

Perez’s future has been a subject of speculation throughout the season, despite Red Bull extending his contract in June, as his performances have consistently failed to impress.

While team mate Max Verstappen has won eight grands prix and cinched the drivers’ championship last week, Perez hasn’t finished in the top five over the last 16 rounds. He’s taken just nine points from the last six rounds and Red Bull look set to lose the constructors’ championship they won over the past two seasons.

However Perez expects Red Bull to keep their faith in him. “At the end of the day, the team has all the information and there’s a reason why we extended my contract during the year,” he said.

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“We exactly know where we are in terms of performance, in terms of issues, difficulties that we’ve had. We are a team. We know exactly internally where everything stands. So we’re working really hard as a team to come through and get back into a much better season than the one that we just had.”

He was eliminated in Q1 last weekend, started 15th and took one point for 10th place. However Perez said his pace during the grand prix was encouraging at times.

“I think in Vegas mainly the main issue we had was qualifying,” he explained. “We went out in Q1 and straight away after qualifying we understood why, we saw it, it was very clear in the data.

“But then we were on the back foot and then going on to the race with the degradation that we had, we were not expecting it to be so severe, especially in the beginning. So we went for the hard tyre, which I also degraded, that meant I had to spend quite a lot of the race on the medium. So it compromised the race a lot. But we did have some good pace during the race.”

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