"He’s definitely lacking some trust" - Former Mercedes 'wingman' on Sergio Perez's plight against Max Verstappen

Former Mercedes wingman Valtteri Bottas feels Sergio Perez seems to be lacking a little bit of trust in himself in his partnership with Max Verstappen. The 2023 F1 season was not the best for Perez. The Mexican started the season impressively and won two of the first four races. However, the season then unraveled for him.

Perez would not win another race all season even though he was in contention for a couple of them. A driver who went through something similar was Bottas. The Finnish driver was teamed up with Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes from 2017 to 2021. During those five years, Bottas had a similar task as Perez.

Talking about the time, Bottas stated that the one thing that a driver should do is back himself to be the best. Looking at Perez's situation, he felt that this was not the case as the Mexican did not seem to believe in himself.

“You have to have this attitude [that you can beat anyone]. You can’t go into a race weekend and tell yourself you can’t beat him. You would have already lost. In this sense, it is a sport in which you always have to have good self-confidence and convince yourself," Bottas was quoted as saying by PlanetF1.

"If you don’t have that trust, you’ll end up in a difficult downward spiral. You can see that on the stopwatch and the consistency. I would say, looking at what Checo is going through, he’s definitely lacking some trust. And you can see that in the results,” he added.

"We were probably taking the wrong approach" - Sergio Perez

Looking back at his season, Sergio Perez talked about how the race in Qatar proved to be a turning point for him. It was at that race where he felt that there was something wrong with the approach and it needed to be rectified.

"I had a really deep, deep warning in Qatar and went back to the factory for like a week and went through it in much detail with the engineers. We understood a lot of things that we weren't doing to compensate for the weaknesses that we had," he was quoted as saying by racingnews365.

"We were probably taking the wrong approach with the car and trying to compensate too much with the set-up and ultimately, getting lost weekend in, weekend out," the Mexican added.

Perez will be hoping to put together a stronger season in 2024 as new contenders emerge for his seat at Red Bull.