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Daniel Ricciardo has offered a surprise olive branch to Sergio Perez, as he admitted that things can get quite tough in Formula 1 when the spotlight is on you and the performances don't add up. The Mexican driver is at risk of losing his seat during the summer break unless he shows something impressive to Red Bull in the next two race weekends.
The problem for Sergio Perez is two-fold because, on the one hand, he has a teammate like Max Verstappen, who is just the best on the entire grid. The Dutch driver is not only relentless, he does not leave anything on the table. As a result, whatever Sergio Perez does, he ends up being a step slower than his teammate. To make things worse, Red Bull has been caught up in terms of performance.
There are four teams that are very close to each other at the front of the grid. As a result, since Sergio Perez is in general 3-4 tenths slower than his teammate, he ends up being too far behind. Daniel Ricciardo, possibly one of the contenders to replace the Mexican, extended a surprise olive branch towards Perez as he said that he understood how things could get wrong in the sport.
Emphasizing how getting a strong result is an important step, Ricciardo told RacingNews365:
"It depends on how we are spotlighted in the media, but the truth is, every driver is under pressure - and even the ones that are killing it, there is pressure for them to keep performing. My point is that we all feel it and I have been in the spotlight a bit this year, Checo is in the spotlight, and even after my good race in Montreal, I said: 'I need to do another good one because you're only as good as you're last race' and one good weekend doesn't get you off the hook."
He added:
"Temporarily it does, but it can change quickly and I've seen some stats that Max has scored a lot more points than Checo, and they are expecting a bit more, but this is the sport, it is what we're all in."
It was surprising to see Daniel Ricciardo extend an olive branch to Sergio Perez, a driver he is competing with for a Red Bull seat.
Daniel Ricciardo draws comparison between Sergio Perez's situation and the Australian's McLaren stint
Daniel Ricciardo drew a comparison of Sergio Perez's situation with his own during the McLaren stint. The Australian had joined the Woking-based squad in 2021 with the aim of being the team leader.
An inability to even keep up with Lando Norris led to his ouster a year before his contract was even signed. Talking about Perez, Ricciardo drew parallels with his situation at McLaren and how that impacted him as well. He said via RacingNews365:
"We feel it all the time, it is just who is in the spotlight this week and it is up to us to try and obviously shut it out, and that is not easy. Sometimes if everyone is just asking you questions, sometimes it feels very negative and sometimes it feels heavy."
He added:
"But in my experience, and we can put Checo in there as well as he's been in F1 for a similar amount of time, we have dealt with it enough that you learn to focus on the engineering, on the car set-up and the rest you just have to roll with."
Daniel Ricciardo is arguably in the best possible position to know what Sergio Perez would be going through right now as the Australian went through something similar at McLaren.
