Perez gets support from Horner: 'Want to help him through this period'

Sergio Perez's season is not going quite how the Mexican envisaged it himself. Max Verstappen's teammate wanted to compete with the Dutchman for the championship, but Checo is now 99 points behind the two-time world champion. Things need to change, according to Red Bull team boss Christian Horner.

Perez started the season very strongly, with victories in Saudi Arabia and in Azerbaijan. The Mexican talked about wanting to battle for the world title with his teammate. However, the past few race weekends have been going less and less well. In the last five qualifying sessions before the races, Checo failed to get into Q3, where Verstappen almost always manages to put his car in pole position. As a result, the six-time race winner has to play catch-up every time to still get on the podium, but regularly fails to do so.

Horner sees the Red Bull driver's poor results, and states in the F1 Nation podcast that performance needs to improve: "Checo has had a horrible run of Saturdays. Some of it is bad luck, some of it is self inflicted. We are trying to help him through that period. He is still second in the world championship and has won two Grands Prix so far out of the 10 this year. Hopefully he can rediscover the form he showed in Jeddah and Azerbaijan where he showed he was on top of his game."