Sergio Perez is back on the F1 grid in 2026, and he has been unusually candid about why the comeback matters to him — and about the Red Bull culture he says drained his confidence before he left.
Speaking on the High Performance podcast, the Mexican framed his switch to Cadillac, the grid's newest team, as a personal reset. "This is a massive project; this is a massive brand," he said. "It can be my project as well. I can be part of it and I can show myself that I'm one of the best and I want to do that because I always believe that I'm one of the best on the grid."
The self-belief, by his own account, took a battering during his final Red Bull seasons alongside Max Verstappen. "The period at Red Bull takes that confidence from you when you are not delivering and your team-mate is winning and so on," Perez said. "And I always knew what the issues were, but it takes confidence away from you. That's why I wanted to come back."
Perez was blunt about the pecking order he walked into at Milton Keynes, recalling his first meeting with team principal Christian Horner. "The first time I met Christian, he told me, 'We go racing with two cars because we have to, otherwise we would be super happy just to race with one car,'" Perez said, adding that the message was unambiguous: "Everything is for Max, around Max. We want to win the championship."
He believes his contribution only registered after he was gone. "I overdelivered in all areas over there," Perez said, arguing that "only once I left and they brought in all the other drivers did they realise the job that I have done for them over four years." The parade of drivers Red Bull has tried and discarded in the second seat since has become his evidence.
Not everyone at Red Bull dismissed him. Chief engineer Paul Monaghan, asked about Perez's prospects at Cadillac, backed the veteran to rediscover his form after time away. "Perhaps a year off, a bit of sunshine, reset the brain, and he'll come back — and he'll be fighting fit and fairly quick, I feel," Monaghan said.
Perez is realistic about where Cadillac sits now. "Of course, it's very early days. We are only on our sixth race and there is a sort of culture that is building," he said. But he is convinced the backing behind the project changes the maths. "You're talking about General Motors and TWG. There are two great forces that are not going to stop until they get there."
Whether Cadillac can climb quickly enough to give Perez the platform he wants is unproven — the team is still finding its feet in its debut campaign. What is clear is that Perez sees this less as a soft landing than a chance to settle an argument about his own worth, on his terms, with a manufacturer he insists is only getting started.
---