Zak Brown makes major Sergio Perez Red Bull claim with F1 2024 title in balance

Zak Brown believes it’s Sergio Perez who holds the key to the outcome of the 2024 championship battle, as McLaren versus Red Bull looks set to run and run.

Red Bull leads McLaren by just 42 points in the Constructors’ Championship, a lead that has been continuously shrinking through the middle phase of the season as the competition has closed up on the Milton Keynes-based squad.

Zak Brown: McLaren has a good chance if Sergio Perez’s form continues

A big problem for Red Bull so far this season has been the inconsistency of Sergio Perez’s performances.

While the Mexican had a great first quarter of the season to slot into a comfortable second place in the Drivers’ Championship behind Max Verstappen, Perez has gone completely off the boil in recent races.

Four podiums in the first five races, his best place finish since his fourth-place in Miami has been a trio of seventh-places – most recently at the Belgian Grand Prix.

While Verstappen has kept up his usual excellence, even if victories have eluded him in recent races as McLaren and Mercedes have risen to the forefront, the fact that Red Bull does not currently have two drivers scoring heavily is what McLaren CEO Zak Brown believes will make a huge difference in the final 10 races of this year.

“It’s going to be tough,” Brown said in an interview with the BBC , speaking about the prospects for McLaren to win their first title since 1998.

“I think it’s going to come down to the last race. There’s not much between the cars. It’s gonna come down to how does Sergio Perez perform?

“If he can perform as he’s capable of performing, it’s going to be a hard fight. If he continues to perform as he has this year, we have a pretty good chance, because we have two drivers constantly performing at the front.”

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McLaren, in contrast, have two drivers performing at their best – with both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri scoring their first Grand Prix wins this year, and both the British and Australian have been a constant threat for victories and podiums ever since the MCL38’s first upgrades earlier this season.

With McLaren closing the gap to the front, Brown said he hadn’t quite expected the prospect of a championship win to come quite so soon.

“If I were to sit here and say I’m not surprised, that would be disingenuous,” Brown said.

“Red Bull had such an advantage over everyone and Mercedes has been so dominant.

“I felt like we’d continue to close the gap. Did I think we would be here at the summer break, one race away from getting the lead?

“That race would have to be first and second and fastest lap, and do I think it’s going to happen like that? No. But if we keep the same trajectory we’ve been on the last six, seven races, we’ll be where we need to be by the end of the year.

“I thought we might get where we are now by 2025. I didn’t think we would be where we are now in 2024. But I’m not complaining.”

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