Christian Horner reveals Red Bull agreement on team orders before F1 Saudi Arabian GP after 2022 spat
Perez impressively held off Verstappen, who charged through from 15th on𒐪 the grid, to head home another dominant Red Bull one-two in th🧸e second race of the 2023 season in Jeddah.
With the recovering Verstappen hunting him down in the closing stages, Perez was briefly asked to slow his pace. But after raising his suspicions about whether his teammate was given the same instructions, the Mexican was tol🀅d he was free to push to the en꧒d.
Perez and Verstappen were embroiled in a team orders row at last year’s Sao Paulo Grand Prix, which led Red Bull to admit the incident was a team mistake in an attempt to prevent any te🐷nsion between their drivers spilling over into this season.
Red Bull team principal Horner clarified his side’s stance on team orders after Sunday’s grand prix, revealing all possible scenarios were discussed in a pre-race briefin🎃g.
Asked if Perez wa🐎s hap💦py with Red Bull’s decision not to call off the race in the final few laps, Horner told Sky: “I don’t think he wanted that answer!
"We've got a great car and two great drivers - we talked about it in the briefing earlier today 'you're free to race, but🌼 you keep it clean' - but they're both competitive.
“Checo, that was I think his greatest🌜 Grand Prix."
Onඣ Red💎 Bull’s second straight one-two, Horner added: "The team, all credit to them, have built an incredible car.
"We thought we had an issue𒈔 with Max, checked the dataꩲ and then they were hard at it again.
"They were both pushing hard and Max got the fastest lap of the race, but what a weekend for ꧂him - no fault of his own yesterday with the 🐈driveshaft, 15th, he was patient, he picked the cars off - so a phenomenal recovery from him.”
Horner said Red Bull were unsure if Verstappen’s late issue was a reoccurrence of the driveshaft failure♉ that ruined his qualifying.
"We don't know it was the d💦riveshaft today,” Horner explained. “He heard a noise, he reports that and you immediately think of the failure yesterday. 🐲;
“He reported a high-pitch noise at high-speed. So we check all the data, in Milton Keynes as well, looking at all the channels we have and we co﷽uldn’t see anything.
"Something like that, at that stage, could be catastrophic, but we looked at the data and saw nothing so said to the drivers ‘free to go’✤.”
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