Johnny Herbert has suggested that Lewis Hamilton was correct to call out Red Bull for their lack of support towards Sergio Perez in 2023. Hamilton’s comments appeared to touch a nerve with team principal Christian Horner, who oversaw a one-two in the Drivers’ Championship despite Perez trailing wildly behind team-mate Max Verstappen.
By the end of the 2023 season, Verstappen had racked up more than twice as many points as Perez and almost 10 times as many Grand Prix wins. Until the final few weeks of the year it was touch and go whether the Mexican – driving by far the fastest car in the field – would tie up second place.
Red Bull boss Horner and advisor Helmut Marko raised eyebrows with a number of comments about the struggling Perez over the course of the season. When asked for his take, Hamilton made it clear that he sympathised with the 33-year-old.
“I think that his team is not helping him at all,” the Mercedes star explained. “I know that Red Bull is made up of many members, but there are people who affect him psychologically and do not support him. If I heard such negative things about myself every weekend, it would be very difficult.”
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Horner was quick to issue a stinging response, bringing up Hamilton’s comments on his lineage of F1 team-mates being vastly superior to that of Verstappen. “It’s very nice that Lewis has so much care and attention [for Perez] when he was questioning the validity of Max’s team-mate only a few weeks ago,” he said.
Now, Herbert has had his say, and the three-time Grand Prix winner is with Hamilton on the notion that Red Bull made their second driver’s life more difficult than it needed to be.
“I do remember the Red Bull criticism being quite high,” he told Express Sport, in association with OLBG. “The performances were that little bit better [towards the end of the season], and the criticism seems to have shifted towards supporting him.
“Probably they should have been supporting him when things weren’t going as well. Lewis saying what he’s saying… I get it. Sergio, he’s up against one of the best that we’ve seen throughout the history of F1, and it’s very difficult for him to compete.
“Teams always expect you to be there or thereabouts, within a couple of tenths. But when it’s a second [per lap], that’s where it becomes much more difficult for them. He hasn’t had that support mechanism [in 2023] and it does make the job a lot more difficult.”
Many F1 fans are desperate to see reigning three-time world champion Verstappen partnered with a driver capable of putting him to the sword. Perez is under contract at Red Bull until the end of 2024, by which point Horner and co may look to survey their options.
