Pat Symonds says Sergio Perez ‘bad press’ at Red Bull was undeserved

Sergio Perez’s Red Bull exit was accompanied by a wave of criticism — but was it entirely justified?

Cadillac executive engineering consultant Pat Symonds doesn’t believe so, branding Perez a “very competent driver” who “knows what he’s doing”. He’s also impressed with the driver’s work ethic and feedback.

Cadillac engineering chief Pat Symonds defends Sergio Perez after Red Bull exit criticism

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Joining the Formula 1 grid at the sport’s new 11th team, Cadillac brought back two former race winners as its drivers for the F1 2026 season in Perez and Valtteri Bottas.

Bottas lost his race seat with Sauber at the end of the 2024 season after a difficult year. The team scored just four points, all thanks to Zhou Guanyu, as Bottas was unable to add to the team’s tally.

The Finn remained on F1’s fringes in F1 2025 when his former team Mercedes snapped him up in a reserve role. Bottas and Zhou have reunited at Cadillac with the latter the team’s official reserve for this year.

As for Perez, he went into the season finale in Abu Dhabi in 2024 with a Red Bull contract in hand for the next season having re-signed as Max Verstappen’s teammate. But just a week after the season concluded, Red Bull announced it had agreed to part ways with the six-time grand prix winner.

The decision was made after two trying years for Perez during which he was hounded by speculation that his Red Bull days were numbered.

In 2023, he struggled to match the dominant Verstappen, scoring two wins to his teammate’s 19. It meant that, even though Perez was second in the standings, his tally was less than half of Verstappen’s and pundits questioned whether he was the man for the job.

A year later, Perez’s woes went from bad to worse as Red Bull struggled with the handling of the RB21. While Verstappen still managed to win the World title with eight wins on the board, Perez fell to eighth in the standings.

The writing was on the wall, even with Verstappen calling out critics for being “very harsh” on Perez as the car was “difficult to drive”.

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Now, Perez has a new advocate in his corner, Cadillac executive engineering consultant Symonds, who reckons the Mexican has been unfairly judged based on what he has seen so far during their brief time together at the American team.

“Well, of course, I worked with Valtteri before, at Williams,” Symonds told the media in Bahrain. “I really liked working with him. Very competent driver, very fast driver, very good feedback.

“I didn’t know Checo, so it was really good, even in that first simulator session, to listen to what he had to say. I was very impressed.

“Checo’s had some bad press in the last couple of years, and to me it’s undeserved.

“He’s a very competent driver, he’s won races, he knows what he’s doing.

“And with Zhou as well, he knows our reserve driver. Again, really, really good feedback in the simulator. Really good work ethic, he’s sitting in every briefing, he knows exactly what’s going on.”

“We’ve got a great line-up there, I think,” he added.

Snapped up by Red Bull after losing his Racing Point seat, despite claiming the team’s first win at the Sakhir Grand Prix in the Covid-hit 2020 season, Perez went from “legend” to unemployed.

Verstappen called Perez a “legend” on his radio after his teammate helped him gain over seven seconds on Lewis Hamilton at the season-deciding Abu Dhabi Grand Prix by holding up the then-Mercedes driver. Despite the controversy that followed that Sunday, it was, for Red Bull, Perez’s finest hour as Verstappen won the title ahead of Hamilton.

A year later, he finished on the season’s podium with Verstappen, P3 in the standings, before a P2 followed and then his Red Bull career-ending P8.

But even though he claimed five wins and helped the team to two Constructors’ Championships (and one Drivers’), Perez bore the same fate as his new teammate Bottas: he was the number two.

He was the driver not expected to win, but to help — and then criticised when he didn’t win.

Perez was never expected to beat Verstappen, Red Bull had its rising star. But he was expected to help the team achieve the double, and when his P8 in 2024 meant the team didn’t achieve that, he was given his marching papers – by mutual agreement.

Perez’s side of the equation, led by his father, maintained Red Bull’s cars were built for Verstappen, and even he in 2024 was struggling to put it on the top step of the podium.

Although this season it won’t be easy, at least to the casual observer, for Perez to prove himself as a driver, putting the building blocks into place for Cadillac would go a long way to cementing his legacy in Formula 1.

Cadillac faces a difficult start based on its Bahrain pre-season results.

The team covered 320 laps over the three days in the first official test where Bottas posted a 1:36.824, 17th on the timesheet and three seconds off the pace set by Kimi Antonelli in the Mercedes, while Perez was 19th, a further half a second down.

As ever in Bahrain, fuel loads and engine modes distort the raw times.

Perez said Cadillac would be very disappointed if the team finished P11 in the F1 2026 Constructors’ standings.

“We are definitely not having that mindset, not with the level of investment that has been put in place. We will definitely be very disappointed to finish last,” he told Reuters.

“We know we will not win the championship for sure, but we definitely want to make a lot of progress and beat a couple of teams.”

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