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Formula 1 drivers like to say that there is very little race car driving involved in driving race cars these days. Spend a pre-race day with one of the 20 world-class athletes at the top of motorsport and you will understand just how true this can be.
On a Thursday in late July, a few days before the Hungarian Grand Prix, Red Bull driver Sergio Pérez, best known as simply Checo, one of the most famous athletes in Mexico and all of Latin America, arrives in Budapest via private jet from Madrid and is greeted by a stacked calendar of promotional duties. After he checks in to the Four Seasons, where throngs of Hungarian F1 superfans gather all weekend, he is ferried to a photo shoot for one of his sponsors in an abandoned apartment building in downtown Budapest. Here Pérez is prompted to shuffle through a stack of old photographs and recite memories of various stages of his racing career.
As one of Formula 1’s preeminent journeymen, there is plenty of history for Pérez to draw from. So much history, so much racing over the past three decades, that it’s all begun to bleed together. “I will not remember most of them,” he warns, holding the stack of photos. “It’s one I don’t remember, really,” he says, looking down at the first photo. He draws a blank with another one in which he’s holding a trophy. “I don’t remember, but I had just won a race,” he says.
Suddenly, though, the past comes into focus. “This one, I won the national race, a very important race in Monterrey,” he says, studying a photograph from a karting event from his youth in Mexico. “A big race with a lot of very good drivers.”
“Is it unusual for a Mexican to win a race there?” the cameraman asks him, trying to drag more material out of the exceedingly concise driver. But this question elicits the most direct of responses: “Yes.”
Once the shoot has wrapped, Pérez catches a ride with his right-hand man and longtime friend, Luis Aguirre, to the racetrack. Pérez won’t be driving his Formula 1 car today. Instead, he’ll be shuttled through a precisely timed agenda of interviews, marketing duties, and race-week preparations. There will be cameras and recorders in his face at every turn. As we drive the 14 miles through the arid countryside northwest of the city en route to the circuit, Pérez and Aguirre chat about the Olympics in preparation for a marketing video in which the driver will be grilled about the history of the Games.
“They love to make me look stupid,” the 34-year-old driver says with a good-natured laugh. “The more stupid I look, the better.” Later there will be a drivers’ meeting with Formula 1’s governing body. Brad Pitt’s big-budget Formula 1 movie, F1, will be filming here in Budapest this weekend, which means there is a fictional Formula 1 apparatus operating alongside the real one—fake photographers, fake reporters, fake fans, and fake team staffers in addition to the real ones.
As we pull onto the grounds of the Hungaroring in search of the VIP parking lot, one of Checo’s Red Bull handlers adds another task to the checklist. A piece of the facilities at the Hungaroring is being knocked down, and the drivers must commemorate the event. “There’s a bit of wall for you to sign this week,” the Red Bull employee says. “You can write a message.”
“You see, I’m sure that when you come from the outside, you realize there is so much nonsense,” Checo says, sounding slightly less good-natured than he did a few moments ago. This is his 14th season as a Formula 1 driver, which means he has witnessed his field transform quite a bit from a rarefied European sport geared toward Rolex owners to an increasingly global spectacle with its own Netflix reality television show and a race on the Las Vegas Strip. He has experienced the nonsense ratchet up to a level that almost feels unsustainable. Fans are now fanatics: In Budapest one evening, I witness some admirers jump out of a car at a stoplight and run up to Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc’s road car, begging him for a selfie.
The media attention has escalated too. In a few moments, Pérez will enter the paddock—a long, two-acre stretch that houses the “traveling circus” of all 10 Formula 1 teams—and face a swarm of reporters waving voice recorders in his face. All of this is enough to make the job of driving an 1,800-pound car at 200 miles an hour for a live audience of 110,000 fans seem relaxing by comparison.
And today there’s an extra cloud of tension following Checo around. Speculation on the future of his career is at an all-time high. Pérez has been driving for Red Bull since 2021, a year during which he helped his wunderkind Dutch teammate, Max Verstappen, win his first World Championship by holding off Lewis Hamilton in the season-ending race in Abu Dhabi. While the then 24-year-old Verstappen took home the individual season title, Pérez finished fourth among drivers for the season—but this was by design. Pérez was hired, mid-career, to play a dutiful number two to Verstappen. And Pérez benefited from that role: The modest fourth-place finish was the best he’d ever had in F1. In the years since joining Red Bull, Pérez has won five races and stood on the podium 29 times, threading one of the most microscopic needles in professional sports: He has performed well enough to help Red Bull achieve two consecutive Constructors’ Championships, but not so well that he has ever genuinely threatened the domination of his teammate, the now three-time individual World Champion. Pérez has enhanced the success of his team without destabilizing it.
This year the eye of that needle has become even tighter. After a successful opening run that found Checo on the podium four out of the first five races, he has suffered a sobering streak of bad luck and poor performance at the exact moment when Red Bull’s run of gobsmacking dominance has come under siege from competing teams like McLaren and Ferrari. When Checo fails to score points, it is no longer seen as a blip in an overwhelmingly successful year, but a hindrance to Red Bull’s achieving another team title. And Red Bull, a pressure cooker of a team within a pressure cooker of a sport, doesn’t pull punches with drivers who underperform.
Accordingly, in July in Budapest, the vast network of gossipy Formula 1 news outlets is still slinging speculation about Pérez and his contract with Red Bull, a team that has no problem demoting drivers mid-season: “Pérez no longer secured of Red Bull seat despite contract extension,” one headline reads. “Red Bull says Pérez form ‘unsustainable’ with F1 contract clause set to kick in,” says another.
“If at the next race he doesn’t score points again, soon enough they will have to get him out of the car and put someone else in,” former F1 World Champion Jenson Button sniped recently. The Hungarian Grand Prix, then, could serve as a sort of report card on his fate.
It is an usually hot weekend in Budapest, and it is nearly 100 degrees in the paddock—but all the machinery and pavement and bodies make it feel even hotter. Once Pérez emerges from the wasp’s nest of reporters and sits down inside the Red Bull hospitality center, his brow is furrowed and he’s perspiring lightly. But he doesn’t lose his steely bearing. There is, in fact, hard evidence that Pérez is keeping his cool today: He is wearing a new fitness watch, and his heart rate data is not showing he’s under any unusual stress. “I’ve done this so many times,” he explains. “I know them [the reporters] well. I know how they try to get the pressure into you. They like to get the quote.”
“It’s how the sport is. You have one, two bad races, a lot of negative talk about you and so on,” Pérez says. “But it’s also something in the culture of the team as well—with Red Bull. The surrounding talk, the contract talks and so on. It’s just part of the game.”
It is often said that the toughest job in Formula 1 is being Max Verstappen’s teammate. It presents the catch-22 that no competitor dreams of when starting his career: Pérez must gamely play second fiddle, all while enduring the intensity that comes along with being a Red Bull driver. Sometimes that public scrutiny comes from within his own team, like in 2023, when the famously loose-lipped Red Bull team adviser Helmut Marko told reporters: “He has problems in qualifying, he has fluctuations in form. He is South American, and he is just not as completely focused in his head.” (Marko has since apologized for the racist comment that also placed Mexico on the wrong continent.) Or when Red Bull team boss Christian Horner said of Pérez’s performance: “We cannot run on one leg.”
Earlier this season, Pérez says, “I had an opportunity, two opportunities, to change teams.” But he ultimately chose to stay. “When I looked at it, I thought, I really love the challenge I have at Red Bull. It’s a massive challenge being Max’s teammate. It’s a challenge that basically trains you for all of it. So I said, I want to spend my last part of my career at the top, at the very top, where the pressure, it’s full-on,” he says. The rumor mill has included murmurs that Pérez could soon retire, and parts of our conversation take on a distinctly reflective air. “At the end of the day, when you go through a difficult period, there is a lot of talk,” he says. “But ultimately, there is 90 percent of the grid who would have loved to have my career.”
“When you are a driver, you only think about the next race—the next challenge, the next category, the next contract. It’s always about next, next, next,” he says. “Sometimes it’s good to step back out of it and remember how far you’ve gone. It’s a very brutal sport.”
As for the race in Budapest, Pérez doesn’t exactly put the naysayers’ commentary to rest: During qualifying, he pushes things a bit too far and hits a patch of wet track, which sends the car sailing into the barriers. “I’m okay,” he assures his race engineer over the radio.
“That is how it’s running for him at the moment. It’s critical times for him, and Red Bull,” says one announcer during the many replays of the crash. “What do they do about it? How long can they just keep going, ‘He’ll get his mojo back shortly’? I feel very sorry for him on this one.” During the race the following day, Checo is able to charge back to a respectable seventh place, while Verstappen finishes a disappointing fifth. Red Bull’s multi-season run of dominance is beginning to wane, and Pérez’s performance fades against the backdrop of a grander sense of impending crisis for the team.
Two weeks after Budapest, Formula 1 will shut down for its annual monthlong summer break, which includes a stipulated period when mechanics and engineers are forbidden from working on the cars, and drivers can take a breather. Pérez will return home to Mexico, where he will spend time with his four children, his three dogs, and his wife, Carola. He wants to play golf and try to lower his handicap. But there is a broader, more existential goal for summer break too. “I want to disappear for two weeks,” he says.
As Mexico’s most prominent athlete, there are few places in the country where Pérez can actually disappear. One spot is his new home in Punta Mita, a small peninsula that sits about 26 miles from the posh and trendy beach town of Puerto Vallarta on Mexico’s central Pacific Coast. Another place where Pérez can find some peace and privacy is a 20-room Spanish colonial villa nestled deep in the vast region of agave farms in Jalisco, about two hours from where he was raised. This mansion, La Casona, is part of an exclusive property, Hacienda Patrón, owned by the tequila brand, one of his major partners. He arrives at Hacienda Patrón one Thursday morning in August from Puerto Vallarta by helicopter, and suddenly the Tom Cruise comparisons come into focus.
Even though he is technically on vacation, “you always keep a bit of your mind on what’s going on in racing,” Pérez tells me. We’re sitting in one of La Casona’s cavernous guest suites. “You always keep in mind what you’re eating, your training. You’re still in sharp mode.”
Still, Pérez seems much more at ease than he did a few weeks ago. Red Bull has recently announced that he will, in fact, keep his seat for the remainder of the season, despite another struggle with the car at the Belgian Grand Prix the week after Budapest. I ask him if he feels more settled now that the rumors of a mid-season firing have been put to rest. “I was already settled,” he says. “It was mainly speculation. The main thing is to get our season back on track. It’s not a question of contracts.”
He is here today with Luis Aguirre and two of his childhood friends, Carlos Arroyo and Heladio Nuñez. Pérez’s inner circle is small: His sister, Paola, is in charge of the commercial side and PR at Perez Racing, and Nuñez, an architect and a contractor, designed the company’s office near Guadalajara. For the past three weeks, Pérez has been at his property in Punta Mita with his family, training and playing soccer, or taking a dinghy out on the water to go crocodile-watching with his six-year-old son, Chequito.
In fact, Chequito is at a crossroads in his career too: He must soon decide whether or not he wants to commit to racing. Before Chequito was born, his father built a karting track in Guadalajara for young Mexican drivers. Every Wednesday when Pérez is home, he and his son go to the track. “He likes it, but at the moment he is not really doing it a lot,” Pérez says. “There will be a point where he needs to decide. At the moment, he wants to be a soccer player or a wrestler.”
It’s a phase of fatherhood that surfaces many memories for Pérez. He began his own racing career at six, after being introduced to the sport by his older brother and his father. Amateur karting is serious business outside of the United States, and Pérez scaled the ranks quickly in Mexico. By the time he was a preteen, he’d earned a special license to race in karting leagues with drivers as old as 25. In 2001 he was leading a championship, which would have given him an opportunity to test-drive for a bigger team in the United States—which would have given him a sponsorship, a critical milestone for any young race car driver.
Here, Pérez had his first major brush with the political underbelly of racing. “I was leading the championship, and I had a crash with another driver,” he remembers. That driver happened to be well connected within the Mexican karting federation. They penalized Pérez and revoked his ability to compete in Mexico and finish the season. “That was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says. News of the debacle made its way to Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecommunications mogul and one of the richest people in the world. “They called me and said, ‘Look, we want you regardless of you not winning the championship,’ ” Pérez remembers. “ ‘We believe you are the most talented, the most hungry.’ ”
And so in 2003 Pérez went to the United States to race, and in 2005 he set about getting himself to Europe, the racing epicenter of the world, at the tender age of 15. Racing is a pay-to-play sport across many levels, and he knew that the Slim sponsorship would be his ticket. Eventually, a small German team signed him, and while still just 15, he flew some 6,000 miles from Guadalajara to a small town near Munich called Vilsbiburg.
To imagine Pérez’s life at this stage is to understand the profound challenge of becoming a Formula 1 driver, particularly one who hasn’t been raised in Europe. With some English and no German skills, and no family or friends around him, Pérez had to harness a level of focus that is elusive to the vast majority of teenage boys. Living in a hotel by the motorway with no roommates, no school, and little internet access, he would spend his spare time playing video games for hours on end. He was so isolated from a normal youth that his team boss offered to let him live at a local restaurant he owned just so he could be around more people. “I wanted company, and more than that, I wanted to have a normal life,” he remembers. “But it was impossible because I was all on my own and away from everything, from everyone. On a Friday, instead of going to a 15-year-old’s birthday party, I would be going to the track, to training.” Sometimes he would schedule a dentist appointment for himself back home just for the opportunity to see his friends in Mexico.
The commitment paid off: In feeder European open-wheel racing series—like Formula BMW ADAC, British Formula 3, and GP2—he continued to win races. And in 2011, at just 21 years old, he became a Formula 1 driver, competing for the Sauber team. He scored his first podium finish the next year. The next decade, though, was not linear: Pérez suffered a rocky season with McLaren before signing with Force India, a team that fell into financial disarray after one of its owners fled India in light of fraud charges, and eventually became the new Racing Point outfit. Over his seven-year tenure with the team, Pérez had flashes of brilliance, but also bitter rivalries with teammates and long, fallow stretches of racing. Even when he suffered runs of uneven performance, his bankability helped keep him in the sport: He was a major draw for Mexican sponsors and could also bring the financial backing of Carlos Slim to any team.
By the 2020 season, Pérez was on the brink of losing his seat in Formula 1 entirely when it was announced that four-time World Champion Sebastian Vettel would replace him. Pérez, practically out of options, charged to an unlikely and historic maiden victory at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix, clawing his way from the back of the pack to the front, and ensuring his Formula 1 future in the process. Red Bull signed him shortly after that drive. Suddenly, Pérez was not just staying in F1, he had landed a coveted championship-winning seat. The move raised his profile in Formula 1, but more dramatically, it transformed him into a figurehead and an even bigger celebrity in Mexico and all of Latin America. When he won Monaco, F1’s crown jewel, in 2022, he made the front page of practically every Mexican newspaper.
Since he signed to the team, he’s also been confronted with the intensity of Red Bull’s culture every day. “Red Bull is flat-out on everything,” he says. “Superintense. It’s unbelievable. It’s very structured.” Photo shoots that take full days at other teams take just a couple of hours at Red Bull. Days spent on the race simulator are long and grueling. “There is no waste of time, let’s put it that way,” he says.
But Pérez’s nearly three decades of racing have prepared him well for this kind of intensity. It’s a cliché because it’s true: The turbulent periods have bolstered him more than any victory has. Even at age 34, which is senior citizen status in the sport, Checo says his mentors, Carlos Slim and former Mexican racing driver Jimmy Morales, talk to him like a teenager: “They grab me, and they talk to me like they used to talk to me when I was 15: ‘What’s going on? You have to regroup.’ Those two guys always pull me back.”
“The biggest thing is to not give up and to not get in a comfort zone. Good or bad times, riding the waves is the most important. It’s the only way you can have a successful career in this sport,” he says. “There is no other way.”
This brings him back to his young son, who was born into a comfort zone, with his own race track. There’s a battle Pérez wages every day within himself as a parent. “Whatever he wants to do with his life, he has to chase it. And life is hard,” he says. “There will be a point where he realizes that it takes a while. And it takes a lot of work to reach up. I always feel like the more I protect him, the worse I do for him.”
Over the course of his F1 career, Pérez has accrued a number of flattering nicknames. As an ultra-quick 21-year-old signed to Sauber, he was called the Mexican wunderkind. Later, in 2021, when he held Lewis Hamilton at bay during the season-deciding race in Abu Dhabi, fans started affectionately calling him the Minister of Defense. People also liked to refer to him as an absolute animal, the description that Verstappen’s race engineer gave him over the team radio that day in Abu Dhabi. And when Pérez started racking up wins at street circuits in places like Baku and Monaco, he became known as the King of the Streets.
To his friends, Arroyo and Nuñez, he is still just Checo, the guy they befriended as school children in Guadalajara over two decades ago. They claim that Pérez will sometimes simply space out and forget he is famous, like the time he went to get coffee in the lobby of a hotel without stopping to imagine that he’d be swarmed. This trio still has a sense of boyish mischief between them. This morning in Mexico, they took the helicopter to the Patrón house together, but Pérez won’t say whether they’re getting a ride home or not—or which home he’s headed to.
“He likes pranks,” Arroyo says just before lunch at La Casona. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go back to Guadalajara, or if I’m going to Puerto Vallarta,” Nuñez continues. Pérez once kidnapped Lewis Hamilton’s bulldog, Roscoe. He likes to send his handlers into a panic by saying he is running late or that he can’t make an obligation.
This is not a side of Pérez that his fans, or even his colleagues in the paddock, are accustomed to seeing. He has a reputation for being hyperfocused, conscientious, and low-key, which is one part of why he’s an outlier in the sport. As Formula 1 has grown, its drivers have become global superstars, and many of them have eagerly leaned into the limelight. Some strut around the paddock in designer clothes; others have turned their lives into content for their YouTube channels. A few of the drivers’ dogs (including Roscoe) have even become heartthrobs on social media. But after becoming part of a championship-winning team, Pérez has resisted these kinds of self-branding moves. When England played Spain in the finals of the European Championship this summer, Pérez made a bet with one of the team photographers: If Spain won, he wasn’t allowed to photograph the driver for an entire weekend. (Spain won.) Pérez can’t stand having his picture taken or being the center of attention: He jokes that he “didn’t enjoy” his own wedding, an extravagant event with more than a thousand guests.
“He’s a bit of a hermit,” Arroyo explains. It’s a quality that probably serves Pérez quite well at a moment like this, with his back up against the wall and his season in desperate need of a hard reset. With racing resuming at the Dutch Grand Prix a week from our time in Mexico, Pérez talks about what he’ll need in the remainder of 2024 to feel successful. “Getting back on the podium and winning the Constructors,” he says. “It’s a lot of work to do in the next 10 races.”
In addition to extensive training, there is another, more emotional tool that Pérez returns to again and again for his edge. “I have a picture of myself when I was living in Germany, when I was young, by myself, in my room,” he says. He likes to look at it before races as a way to jolt himself out of any of the feelings that threaten to undermine his path: the complacency of success, or the despair of struggle. “I cannot be disrespectful to that kid,” he says. “When you want to be 80 percent throttle, in certain areas, I very quickly remind myself: Don’t forget where you come from and how hard it was for that kid.”
Carrie Battan is a GQ correspondent.
A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of GQ with the title “From Budapest to Guadalajara with… Mexico’s F1 Megastar”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Neil Krug
Styled by Moses Moreno
Grooming by Octavio Leon
Tailoring by Nicole Garcia
Prop styling by Alex Arbesú Norton
Produced by Malparidas Producciones
Location: Hacienda Patrón