‘Couldn’t fail to be impressed’: Dan’s statement drive on Pérez’s day of home heartbreak: Mexico talking points

Max Verstappen is accumulating Formula 1 records so fast that he’s starting to re-break some of his own.

Verstappen’s 16th win of the season eclipses the previous best of 15 set by — you guessed it — himself last season.

Of course you might argue that numbers like these are historically meaningless with so many races in modern F1.

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But win 16 of 22 took him past Sebastian Vettel (13 of 19), Jim Clark (seven of 10) and Michael Schumacher (13 of 18) into second on the honour board for most percentage wins in a season.

One more win will move him past Alberto Ascari (six of eight) and earn him the record outright.

He’s equalled Alain Prost on 51 career victories, and sweeping the rest of the season will move him into third ahead of Sebastian Vettel.

History in the making.

But of the real interest of the Mexico City Grand Prix wasn’t Verstappen’s world, it was the drivers who are just living in it.

Daniel Ricciardo’s sensational statement race to turn the promise of his F1 return into results.

Sergio Pérez’s home heartbreak and its bearing on his F1 future.

Lando Norris’ continuing McLaren’s ascent into the circle of frontrunners.

Lewis Hamilton’s big drive to keep the battle for second in the both championships alive.

The Mexico City Grand Prix was more than just another chapter in Verstappen domination.

‘OLD’ RICCIARDO ACCELERATES HIS F1 COMEBACK PLAN

“You couldn’t fail to be impressed by Daniel this weekend,” was the assessment from Red Bull Racing Christian Horner to Sky Sports after the race.

At just his second race back from injury, Ricciardo delivered emphatically AlphaTauri’s best result of the season.

Fourth on the grid is the highest the team has started all year. Seventh is the team’s best finish since last April. His six points improved the team’s score by 60 per cent, moving it from last up to eighth ahead of Alfa Romeo and Haas — a move worth millions of dollars if held at the end of the campaign.

The AlphaTauri car has been upgraded in recent rounds, but it’s not a frontrunning machine.

The strong weekend is partly thanks to the unique conditions of the Mexico City circuit suiting the car, but having a result available and achieving said result are two different things. Ricciardo’s impact was to get the maximum out of his opportunity.

And this was an even better performance than seventh suggests. Without the red flag artificially closing the pack and giving George Russell and Lando Norris a second run on medium tyres, sixth was comfortably up for grabs and even fifth was probably achievable.

The parallel with teammate Yuki Tsunoda is hard to draw given the sister car started from the back with engine and gearbox penalties, but the Japanese driver’s impetuous attempted pass on Oscar Piastri created a stark contrast with Ricciardo’s clean and calm approach to clinging to as high a finish as possible — exactly what’s needed when driving a car far above its station and precisely the traits the team is so excited to have in one of its cockpits after years running less experienced drivers.

Ricciardo hailed feeling “like [his] old self” after qualifying. On Sunday he confirmed that old Daniel — the version that made him a household name at Red Bull Racing and turned him into one of the grid most highly sought after drivers at Renault — is no longer hiding just beneath the surface.

“It’s great to see Daniel looking like his old self,” Horner concluded.

Left unasked is whether Horner has seen enough to get old Daniel back into his old car.

SERGIO PÉREZ BREAKS HOME HEARTS AND HIS OWN

The sound of more than 100,000 breaking Mexican hearts sounds a lot like the thump of Red Bull-branded carbon fibre against a Ferrari-mounted tyre.

Sergio Pérez had talked a good game in the lead-up to his home race. His qualifying performance was positionally underwhelming in fifth but his deficit to Verstappen ranked among the smallest of the year.

He got the dream start off the line, and a gap opened just for him on the outside line of the first turn.

Then an eager jink of the steering wheel. A big thump into the side of Charles Leclerc. He got airborne and destroyed itself as it crunched against the ground, obliterating his podium hopes with it.

It was a colossal misjudgment, with a potential statement drive gone begging at a crucial moment in his career.

“I would be really disappointed to be on the podium today knowing that I had a chance to go for the lead and I didn’t take it,” he explained to Sky Sports. “Being two times in a row on the podium, I just wanted to give it all. I went totally for it.

“I wasn’t expecting Charles to be in the middle … I think simply there was no room for three cars. It was a total racing incident.

“I shouldn’t say it, but in hindsight I should have backed off — and gone home.”

You’d have to be cold-hearted not to feel for Pérez as emotion threatened to overwhelm him as he realised his day was done.

He isn’t the first driver to wilt under the pressure of delivering at home, but its combination with the need for a big result to end his interminable form slump created a toxic cocktail of epic disappointment.

But it’s about more than form now. The Mexican’s constant fumbles in locking down second in the drivers championship is a cause for concern.

His shockers in Japan and Qatar left him vulnerable, and now Hamilton has taken 19 points out of what should have been a comfortable buffer. The margin is now down to 20 points with three rounds remaining. Had Hamilton not been disqualified from the United States Grand Prix, they’d have been equal.

Pérez might’ve had his eyes on victory, but the team is still playing for the championship one-two — an achievement rumours have constantly pegged to his future, though Red Bull Racing denies this is the case.

But with Ricciardo capitalising for his first points of the season, it could be Pérez’s heart that breaks next.

DID LANDO NORRIS LOSE A VICTORY CHANCE?

Would you describe Lando Norris’s day as bittersweet?

Norris recovered 12 places from a lowly 17th on the grid, strategising his way forward in the first half of the race and making pass after quality pass to end the afternoon as the grand prix’s most upwardly mobile driver.

True, his day was made a little easier by the red flag. He’d been put right on the bubble of needing to make two stops after an early first tyre change. The safety car preceding the suspension gave him a cheap second stop, rescuing his race.

But most of those gains were then erased by a poor launch, dropping him back to 14th and forcing him onto the hard route into the top five.

It was a superb drive that demonstrated all the abilities that mark Norris out as one of the grid’s best.

His side-by-side pass on Ricciardo highlighted his precision behind the wheel, and forcing George Russell into a mistake that coughed up fifth underscored his racecraft.

“It wasn’t from 20th to 10th; it was from 14th up to fifth,” Norris told Sky Sports of his second-stage comeback. “It was against George and Alex [Albon] and Oscar and Daniel — it was against some quick guys and smart guys.

“I played it all well. I played the overtakes well. I put them into awkward positions. I managed to get past them all very quickly, which allowed me to end up in P5.”

But in that context you have to wonder what could have been achieved had Norris not fluffed his lines in qualifying, knocking himself out in Q1 with a moment of overdriving that simply wasn’t required with a car as good as his.

Starting 17th instead of, say, seventh, where teammate Oscar Piastri put his car, meant his race was one of damage limitation rather than damage infliction.

Some crude maths paints the picture. Norris was around 17 seconds behind Verstappen when he made his first post-suspension overtake for 13th place. He ended the race 33 seconds adrift, losing 16 more seconds making his remaining eight overtakes.

A raw 16-second gap to Verstappen would’ve put him third at the flag, only just behind Hamilton in a battle for second place. Take out the time lost making those eight overtakes and he surely would’ve been Verstappen’s closest challenger.

“Just one opportunity that I missed out on,” he said. “I know there’s the ‘what could have happened’ and all of this stuff, but that’s always me. That’s my mentality.

“But at the same time I’m just happy with how we did today, and I made up for that mistake.”

Piastri’s race secured eighth, a solid result considering damage picked up on the first lap and in his battle with Yuki Tsunoda that consolidated a 20-point lead over the hapless Aston Martin for fourth in the teams standings.

FERRARI PLAYS THE NUMBERS GAME IN TIGHT MERCEDES BATTLE

Hamilton’s well-judged second place and bonus point for fastest lap gets him back within 20 points of second in the drivers championship, and with Mercedes on the rise — and Pérez continuing to flail — he’s still in with a shout of taking an unlikely runner-up finish.

Three podiums in the final rounds with Pérez finishing fifth or sixth would be just enough. Another non-score for Pérez would surely be fatal to his hopes.

But Mercedes is also battling to keep ahead of Ferrari in second in the constructors standings, a fight worth millions of dollars.

Ferrari played a strong hand in Mexico, taking an unexpected front-row lockout. A solid strategy call to run its own race paid dividends, with a reasonable three-four finish.

The team knew it didn’t have the tyre life — a season-long problem — to run the same early-stopping strategy as Hamilton or Verstappen. It’s not the second-quickest car. It instead remained focused on running its own race. The drivers executed cleanly — Leclerc despite having a damaged front wing for the first half of the race — to keep the margin steady at 22 points.

The test will be whether the Scuderia can split Russell from Hamilton. The younger Briton has been the less consistent performer in the last month or so. With Leclerc and Sainz usually very closely matched, Ferrari has a shot at creating an exciting conclusion to the best-of-the-rest title stakes.