No way to go: How Sergio Perez’s lengthy Red Bull exit is reminiscent of Daniel Ricciardo

Sergio Perez is to leave Red Bull ahead of the F1 2025 season, with Liam Lawson expected to step up from the Racing Bulls team to become Max Verstappen’s new team-mate. Perez’s exit leaves a similar taste to Daniel Ricciardo’s Singapore GP farewell…

There is a famous saying in sport that athletes die twice: the first time when they retire, the second time when…well, y’know.

Sergio Perez to leave Red Bull ahead of F1 2025 season

A version of this article originally appeared in PlanetF1.com’s conclusions from the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

Dramatic it may seem, yet it captures perfectly the finality of stepping away from something around which your entire life up to that point has revolved.

Retirement? It is more a reincarnation. A reinvention. A reconfiguration of who you are, what you do and how you view the person looking back at you in the mirror.

Life is never – can never – be the same again.

It explains why sport is littered with so many poignant stories of people whose existences are stripped of purpose, never to be regained, when they wake up the next morning and the realisation hits that it really is all over.

What now? Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.

It matters, then, to have a good retirement.

A retirement over which you have some control, particularly for those who have contributed heavily to their chosen sport over a long period of time.

It is why so many hearts bled back in Singapore when Daniel Ricciardo, among the most prominent and popular drivers of the last decade, was left to dangle for a full race weekend before slipping into the shadows almost unnoticed.

Ricciardo, deep down, knew Singapore was his last race; Red Bull knew Singapore was his last race.

Sergio Perez follows Daniel Ricciardo out of F1’s door

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But neither could definitively say so, serving only to create this humiliating, intensely awkward – should I hug you now just in case or save it til later? – atmosphere.

A leading F1 photographer on duty that night recalled being left with the distinct impression that Daniel just didn’t want to leave, finally exiting a deserted paddock some hours after the race had finished and long after everyone else of note had headed for home.

That, by any measure, was no way to go.

Was Sergio Perez not paying attention that weekend? Did it not occur to him that it could well be him in that position just a few months later?

Perez, you’ll recall, had already once come close – exceptionally so – to being replaced this year.

As revealed by PlanetF1.com, Red Bull’s plans to make a change over the summer break were so advanced that they even reached the stage of arranging a shootout test between Ricciardo and Liam Lawson to inform a decision on his replacement, only for Christian Horner and Co. to have a change of heart 24 hours after the Belgian Grand Prix.

If Perez came so close to losing his seat in August, when his deficit to Max Verstappen stood at 146 points, it has been clear for some months that the situation would be revisited at the end of the season with the difference between the Red Bull drivers almost doubling across the final 10 races.

Horner’s comments in the aftermath of the Qatar Grand Prix that Perez must “come to his own conclusions” effectively amounted to an ultimatum: jump or be pushed.

Checo’s counter at the season finale in Abu Dhabi, maintaining all weekend long that he had a contract for next season and intended to stick to it, ensured that he would not go quietly.

Or with much class, on the evidence of his father’s threats to publish a hit list of what he described as “lying” media outlets and reporters.

With his performances below the required standard for some time, the confrontational public response of the Perez camp completed his regression to Full Pay Driver Mode.

They’re easy enough for teams to get in, pay drivers, but an absolute pain to get shot of when they start digging their heels in.

How he laughed off those rumours in September that he planned to announce his exit at the Mexican Grand Prix.

Yet pause to picture of the scene if he had elected to end his career at his home race, returned by his sport to from whence he came in some quasi-religious act.

He would have likely been treated to his own parking spot in the stadium section after the chequered flag, cherished like never before the adulation of the spectators with his family close by and perhaps even permitted a special farewell appearance on the podium.

Who, at that point, would have cared how his season had transpired?

The boy from Guadalajara would have bowed out there and then as the King of Mexico, the most successful F1 driver in his nation’s history at a race that only exists in its current form thanks to his impact of single-handedly reawakening a country’s interest.

It would have made for one of the emotional highlights of the season and become a template for how to retire right.

More than anything, it would have been the easy way out, a perfect exit done on his terms.

Instead? The harder route was chosen, ceding control and ultimately consigning himself to following Ricciardo out F1’s door.

It’s no way to go.

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