'No driver can survive with Max Verstappen as a teammate'

In retrospect, Sergio Perez does not seem to have performed that badly at Red Bull Racing, looking at the way Max Verstappen consistently crushes his teammates with the same material after the Mexican left. "I think so, yes", confirms James Hinchcliffe, former IndyCar driver and current analyst of F1 TV during an exclusive interview with GPblog.  

He then discusses the list of names that Verstappen previously outpaced. "Gasly got beaten by Max, went on to be a team leader at Alpine. Albon got beaten by Max, who's now beating Carlos Sainz, who was wheel-to-wheel with Charles Leclerc, who's considered one of the best."

Whoever it is, Verstappen has the absolute upper hand on his teammate, who is constantly getting wrecked. It reminds Hinchcliffe of what could have happened at Mercedes. "When all the rumors circulated that Max might go to Mercedes, I remember thinking: 'When all the rumours were going around about Max maybe going to Mercedes, I remember thinking like, ‘oh, Toto [Wolff] doesn't care about Kimi Antonelli’, because you will end his career if you put Max beside him. And it's nothing on Kimi. Nobody has been able to survive alongside him (Verstappen, ed.)."

The fact that Verstappen excels against every teammate can partly be traced back to the fact that the Dutchman can handle Red Bull's difficult cars while drivers alongside often cannot. There may come a time when Verstappen has more trouble with his colleague, if the car is built in such a way that an 'ordinary' driver can also race hard.

Perhaps next year, when the new regulations come into effect? "It's an interesting question because obviously the current generation car was really built around Max. Checo [Perez] was the second driver at the time. Adrian [Newey] was designing the car and we know that he has a tendency to design the fastest car, not the easiest car."

"So maybe with a bit of a different mindset, it'll leave the setup window a little bit bigger, the performance window a little bit bigger and give the team a better shot at having both drivers competing at the front. It's very possible but we just don't know," Hinchcliffe concludes.