Sergio Perez fears reliability issues will "hit" Red Bull at some point in the 2023 Formula 1 season, and he warned Red Bull to keep on top of the matter. The Milton Keynes squad have started the new season in dominant fashion with a win apiece for Max Verstappen and Perez in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, respectively. In Jeddah, reliability gremlins struck the team with Verstappen suffering a driveshaft failure in qualifying and gearbox changes being made on both cars over the weekend. With no team seemingly close to matching Red Bull's pace, Perez has insisted the team get on top of the matter - claiming they would have been forced to retire in Sakhir had they pushed.
Perez's reliability warning
"Well, reliability is where it is. We saw it with Aston Martin [through Lance Stroll's retirement]," Perez explained to media, including RacingNews365 ,post race. "It's going to hit us at some point, but obviously we need to keep working on that, we need to have issue-free races whenever we can. "We were in a lucky position in Bahrain but otherwise if we had to push to the end, we probably wouldn't make the end of the race so there are a lot of reliability concerns at the moment but hopefully they don't hit us anytime soon." Verstappen also responded that the team just need to do "better" and have a "cleaner weekend" after he also felt vibrations in the latter stages in Jeddah the the felt were linked to the driveshaft.
Red Bull vs Red Bull
With Red Bull enjoying at least a one second per lap pace advantage over the other front running teams in both races, attention has already turned to the intra-team battle for the championship. Both drivers were asked how they would handle such a battle, with Verstappen believing it to be "fairly simple." "If that is the case, it's fairly simple, right? We are allowed to race so the best one will finish in front," while Perez said it would be "fantastic because that means we are pretty far ahead [of the rest] and it comes down to us (as individual drivers)."
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