Perez leads dominant Red Bull 1-2 in Saudi Arabia

Sergio Perez beat teammate Max Verstappen for the victory at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in another dominant 1-2 Formula 1 result for Red Bull Racing.

Pole-sitter Perez’s race was almost perfect Sunday but for his tardy launch off the line that handed an early lead to second-place starter Fernando Alonso – who didn’t need to be asked twice to take the straighter line through the first chicane and take first place.

But it became quickly obvious that the Aston Martin was no match for the Red Bull Racing car. Perez bided his time until lap four, when he blasted back into the lead with the help of a super-effective DRS and never looked back, with his way being eased by a lap-17 safety car that gifted him an easy pit stop.

Perez’s only threat came from Verstappen, who started 15th on the grid after a failed driveshaft in qualifying. The Dutchman took just eight laps to rise into the top 10 and was within Perez’s pit stop window when the safety car was deployed. He shook out from the caution pit stops in fourth but was rapidly up to third ahead of George Russell, and within five laps of the restart Verstappen was into second ahead of Alonso.

Verstappen was given a lap time target of 1 minute, 33 seconds, but regularly appeared to ignore the instruction, diving easily into the 1:32 to slice the gap. Even worries for his driveshaft, about which he radioed his team that he could feel vibrations at high speed, weren’t enough to deter him from his goal.

Perez was told that Verstappen was ignoring instruction to manage his pace and reluctantly sped up, asking rhetorically whether both cars should be risking problems by pushing so hard, but he had enough in hand to break Verstappen’s challenge to win by 5.3 seconds.

“It turned out to be tougher than I expected,” Perez said.

Alonso finished third at the flag for his 100th podium but was stripped of the place in the aftermath for incorrectly serving a 5-second penalty during his sole pit stop. He was demoted to fourth and Russell was moved up to third.