F1 star Sergio Perez reveals plan to CANCEL contract mid-season

Max Verstappen, Sergio Checo Perez, Red Bull, Qatar, 2024 — Photo: © IMAGO

F1 News & Gossip

F1 star reveals plan to CANCEL contract mid-season

Sergio Perez is back in the sport with Cadillac this year

Sam Cook Digital Journalist

Sports Journalist who has been covering motorsport since 2023

Sunday 11 January 2026 19:51

F1 star Sergio Perez has revealed that his contract in the sport was almost terminated mid-season.

Perez is returning to a full-time F1 seat in 2026 with the new Cadillac outfit, teaming up with Valtteri Bottas in a highly experienced driver lineup.

The Mexican racer is a six-time grand prix winner, with five of those six wins coming during a successful spell as Max Verstappen's team-mate at Red Bull between 2021-2024.

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Perez helped the Milton Keynes-based outfit win back-to-back constructors' championships in 2022 and 2023, and finished runner up in the drivers' championship in the 2023 campaign.

However, Perez's form began to tail off in the back end of the 2023 season, and he then struggled massively in 2024, only managing an eighth place drivers' championship finish.

That led Red Bull to axe him at the end of the season, despite the fact that he had signed a new contract in the early stages of the season after a plethora of podium finishes.

Now, as he gets sets for a return to a full-time seat in the sport, Perez has suggested that Red Bull almost axed him from his contract during the middle of the season.

"I remember a race in Spa they were on the verge of cancelling my contract," he told the Oso Trava podcast. "It's the middle of the year, they didn't cancel it.

"We went back to Zandvoort, I was already complaining a lot about the car, we went back to Zandvoort and Max started complaining about the same things I was.

"Max is the driver who can best tolerate not feeling the car behind him; he doesn't have a driving style that makes him feel the rear. So when Max complains about that, it means it's really bad, it's terrible, and in Italy Max says, ‘I can't drive this car anymore’. So I said, ‘Phew, finally they're going to listen to us’.

"At the next race, the team modified the floor, they put a new floor on my car, with the modifications that Max requested, they put it on my car. I was a second faster than everyone else in practice when they put that floor on my car."

Perez set for 2026 return

Perez will be excited for his return to the grid, but will know that he is highly unlikely to be challenging for podiums and race wins like he was in his early days at Red Bull.

Cadillac are a brand new outfit, and will be using Ferrari engines to begin with, before their power unit partnership with General Motors begins from the 2028 season.

Team principal Graeme Lowdon has recently said that he's already warned the directors of the new team that Cadillac will likely be running right at the back of the pack in 2026, despite their exciting driver pairing.

The team were only confirmed to be joining the grid back in November 2024, and have had to start from scratch unlike the newly named Audi team who have taken over an already established outfit in Sauber.

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