Max Verstappen has been warned that team-mate Sergio Perez is likely to take an "all guns blazing" approach to compete against him for the rest of this year.
Perez has been Verstappen's partner at Red Bull since 2021. No team-mate of the Dutchman has survived for as long as the 34-year-old has, though his current contract does expire at the end of this year.
The seat is currently his to lose and Perez has begun well, with three podiums from four races so far in 2024. He is backing Verstappen up well, which is exactly what the team wants from him.
Still, there remains doubt over his Red Bull future especially with several attractive options for the team to consider. And Sky Sports F1 pundit Bernie Collins thinks that means the Mexican will race like he has nothing to lose.
"[Perez] is now the longest-standing team-mate of Max Verstappen," she told The Fast and the Curious podcast. "Everyone else has been dispensed of way ahead of this. So I think he's just thinking, 'I just need to [go] all guns blazing and not worry so much about it'.
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"I almost wonder if the moment that they start to cut that back, can they perform on anything near the same level? Like, the moment they start to worry about not crashing the car or whatever, do they lose too much? There were times last year when performance wasn't good enough in qualifying.
"I did an interview with him in Holland actually last year, and I sort of said, 'If you focused on just finishing second, would you finish second more consistently than any of the focus on being first?' He didn't really seem to take it on board so much. I think that they're just so driven.
"You've seen some instances of it, where he goes for... Mexico was the best example. He went for the position on Lap 1, and it really didn't pay off, right? But, if he hadn't gone for that, are Red Bull saying, 'Oh, he's not aggressive enough?' The only people he needs to impress to keep his job are Red Bull. So he needs to show that he's got that fight in him and he's not going to just sit back and take [it]. It's really difficult."
Collins worked with Perez when she was a race strategist at Racing Point and knows first-hand the Mexican's qualities. She added: "He's really, really driven. All of them really want to achieve a lot and they're all driven by beating their team-mate by getting the points and trying to prove themselves.
"Checo [Perez] spent a lot of time at Force India or Racing Point trying to prove that he was good enough to get to that top team. They all have this massive self-belief that any of the rest of us just don't have."
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