Red Bull Engineer Expecting Perez's Backlash As He Reveals Gap To Verstappen
F1Saturday, 20 July 2024 at 15:30
Chief engineer at Red Bull Racing, Paul Monaghan, put numbers to the gap that we see between Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez on track.
Going into the 13th round of the season at Hungaroring, Sergio Perez beat his triple-world champion teammate in only one of the 12 preceding races- the Australian Grand Prix.
The race in Australia was also the only one that the Dutchman didn't finish as he suffered technical problems and had to retire his RB20.
Realistically, the Mexican driver hasn't beaten Max Verstappen since the 2023 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, which was precisely 30 race weekends ago.
How is it possible? Red Bull's chief engineer, Paul Monaghan, suggested that Verstappen is simply better than his 34-year-old teammate. He told F1's Beyond the Grid podcast:
"I wouldn't want to be rude to Checo, and he may well bite my head off if he was sat here,"
"I'd say, in general, Max is a little bit quicker than Checo. For me, that's not a controversial statement. Checo may well be most upset with me."
There are teammate pairings on the grid that are much more closely matched than the Red Bull duo. For example, the average qualifying gap between the two Mercedes drivers is less than one-tenth of a second.
In Red Bull, Monaghan says the average gap is around half a second per lap. However, the chief engineer went on to suggest that half a second is not as much as big of a difference as it might seem. He added:
"Half a second on average. Okay, let's say most circuits have 20 corners because it makes the maths easy, look at that as an increment per corner."
"The difference, per corner, [Max] maybe pulls half a tenth in one corner. It borders on trivial, doesn't it? Yet it adds up through a lap."
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