18x F1 podium finisher takes shots at Sergio Perez with 'two is going to be better than one' remark

It's not a good thing when a rival driver considers you a liability, but that's precisely what happened with Sergio Perez after the F1 Canadian GP, as rival team McLaren's driver Lando Norris pointed out that the Woking-based squad's two drivers are going against one Red Bull driver in Max Verstappen.

Sergio Perez came into the F1 Canadian GP on the back of signing a two-year extension with Red Bull. This means that the driver is not going anywhere and will be part of the team until 2026. Unfortunately for the Mexican, his form has not been that good recently, and a similar story continued in Canada.

On Saturday, while Max Verstappen was fighting for pole position with George Russell of Mercedes, Sergio Perez had already been eliminated in Q1. The race day went even worse. The Mexican suffered damage on the very first lap of the race and then crashed out.

Max Verstappen, on the other hand, won the race for Red Bull. The bigger observation made by many was the fact that even though Max won, McLaren still closed the gap on the Austrian team in the championship.

Talking about this in the post-race press conference, Lando Norris touched on how McLaren and Ferrari were in a unique position where they were fighting with two competitive drivers who could get the result. Red Bull on the other side had only Max Verstappen performing, as Sergio Perez was unable to keep up with him. Claiming that it was 2 vs 1 against Red Bull, Norris said (via CrashF1),

"To be honest, at the minute, I think between Ferrari and us, Yeah, so we'll keep pushing and I think that's one of our biggest strengths at the minute. We have two drivers as McLaren who are up there not making mistakes and getting pretty much everything out of the car every single weekend. Yeah, it's rare that there's not many other teams on the grid that have such a thing. So for us, it's more out of what we can do against Ferrari."

He added,

“Again, we've been a more consistent team coming into this weekend. They've had some mistakes and just struggled a little bit more for whatever reason. But in the end of the day, I think two is going to be better than one, you know, in Max's case. So we're doing a good job, but we still need to keep pushing on and try and bring more upgrades and things like that. Because with Mercedes joining, it's only going to make it harder to score big points like we did today.”

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Max Verstappen touches on fighting against McLaren sans Sergio Perez

Max Verstappen was also present in the press conference, and he admitted that the damage to Sergio Perez's weekend was already done on Saturday. Once you do not qualify well it's always going to be an uphill battle to win after that.

Verstappen did however feel that if he's winning the races then that minimises the damage caused by a bad weekend for Sergio Perez. Dismissing the performance in Canada as a one-off, Max said (as per the aforementioned source),

“I think the damage was done yesterday, of course, for Checo. You know, starting in the back, it's very hard in these conditions. Then, of course, I saw him retire with the damage," Verstappen said.

He added,

“So I knew that I had to score big, of course, to not let the other teams catch up a lot. But I do think at the end of the day, as long as you keep winning, so you score 25 points, even if the others finish P2, P3, you don't really lose out too much. And then, you know, you kind of can afford sometimes these one-offs. But of course, naturally, we always want the two cars to be up there. And I also have no doubt that that will change very soon again."

Sergio Perez's lack of performance is something that's been a major concern for Red Bull. The driver now has the assurance of a two-year contract and would be hoping to get back to performing well for the team.