Sergio Perez says retiring from Formula 1 would be “the easy route” out of his current struggles at Red Bull and that he will fulfill his contract with the team next year.
Rumors surfaced ahead of the United States Grand Prix that Perez was preparing to announce his retirement in Mexico next week following a tough run of form since finishing second to Max Verstappen in Monza. Perez said the claims are completely false and that he is relishing the challenge of trying to turn results around.
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“There’s nothing I can do, I’m fully focused on my job,” Perez said. “That really sums up my season: a guy says something about me and all of a sudden it becomes true. But I have a contract for next year and I have no reason to not fulfill that contract. I’m going to give my very best to it, I’ve done a commitment but it will not be my final contract in Formula 1.
“It’s not ideal when you go through a difficult period of your career. But I just love the challenge of getting back at it. The easiest thing would be to just walk out of it. But that’s not me, that’s not who I am and I will not give up.
“I have zero doubts about being back to my best level and that is my only target that I have in mind. I don’t even think about retirement or anything like that because that’s just the easy route.”
Asked if he will be with Red Bull in 2024, Perez insisted “100%,” saying he feels he has the full support of the team.
“I’m with Red Bull and I want to stay with Red Bull,” he said. “But obviously it has to work out for both sides… I have a contract and conversations with the team as well. There is no reason for me not to fulfill that contract.”
Perez puts his recent struggles down to setup issues that then spiraled as he searched for a more comfortable configuration.
“I think the last two races in particular, we were just lost,” he said. “I think we are back at it. I had very good days with my engineers, I had the full support of the team and now it’s time to really pull it back.
“Basically, it was important for us to understand where it went so wrong. And once you go into these fast weekends, for example with the sprint event in Qatar, if you don’t have a good set-up, you can easily get lost. And it’s what happened to us. We just got really lost in Qatar.
“But this is how this sport is: you have a good weekend, a bad weekend. We haven’t really been able to get consistency through the year, but there are still five races where things can change for us.
“We cannot have this sort of gap (to Verstappen in future). I think, basically, to go back to the first six races or so and we were fighting with Max. That’s the target, to get back to that level of comfort with the car. My issues have been real and we’ve been struggling with the car a bit and hopefully next year can be a different story, but also these next five races.”