Red Bull technical chief Wache explains ongoing push to help Perez and insists the team still have faith in him

Pierre Wache has opened up on the efforts Red Bull are going to behind the scenes amid Sergio Perez’s difficult run of F1 weekends, making clear that he is being fully supported in his quest to rediscover some form.

Perez built on his best-ever finish of P2 in last year’s standings by scoring four podiums from the opening five races of 2024 to back up team mate Max Verstappen and help Red Bull build a solid lead in the constructors’ championship.

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However, his performances have nosedived since then, including a disastrous turn of events in qualifying with four Q1 exits at the last six Grands Prix – the Mexican crashing out of proceedings in Hungary last weekend.

Before that incident, Red Bull Technical Director Wache was asked about Perez’s struggles and what he feels are the factors behind them, to which he replied, “if I knew, I would fix it”.

“It's difficult to say,” the Frenchman continued in the FIA press conference. “I think it’s partly us, for sure, and it’s what we have to [do to] try to help him to extract the potential of the car.

“I have some feedback from him. We have some feedback. We try to help him.

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“The point is not only reflecting to how he feels in the car. Sometimes he’s unlucky, you know, it’s what happened in some quali [sessions] that could affect the overall result of the race.”

Speaking to F1 TV, Wache expanded: “I think we are trying to understand what he suffers with, or with the characteristic and balance, that could help him.

“When we understand that, and that is quite difficult to be honest, how we transform that in terms of set-up or in terms of car characteristic development.”

Pushed on whether it comes down to car set-up, he said: “Everything is linked nowadays. The number of tests you can do and the number of new tyres you have in a session, it’s limited, that it’s difficult to see a path with that.

“If it was simple we would fix it a long time [ago], but we try to help him as much as we can, and the engineers working with him are trying.”

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And, finally, when asked if Red Bull still have faith in the six-time Grand Prix winner, who signed a new two-year deal in June, Wache stated: “Oh yeah, for sure. Otherwise, he [would] not be there.”

Perez sits seventh in the drivers’ standings after 13 of 24 scheduled races this season, 141 points behind Verstappen, with the McLaren drivers, Ferrari pair and Mercedes man Lewis Hamilton sitting between them.