Red Bull Racing has no intetion of letting Perez go anytime soon as they have locked him in until the end of the 2023 season as so far.
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Today, Mexico is represented in Formula One by one of the best drivers on the grid in Sergio Perez. The current Red Bull Racing driver is the embodiment of a proper team player who might have not been with the team for that long yet but may be compared with the likes of Valterri Bottas and Rubens Barrichello when it comes to being a driver for the team. With his support, Max Verstappen has won two world championship titles and he only seems to be getting started. Red Bull Racing has no intetion of letting Perez go anytime soon as they have locked him in until the end of the 2023 season as so far.
Mexico has seen its fair share of Formula One drivers and while some of them have not managed to ever get on the top step of the podium, there are some who who have created history and will go down in the country’s extensive sporting culture. Here’s the top Mexican Formula One drivers ranked.
Who else but the world’s beloved Checo for the number one spot? Perez is undoubtedly the greatest Formula One driver Mexico has ever produced by quite a mile. The current Red Bull Racing man has 232 race starts to his name, 24 podiums, four wins, one pole position, nine fastest laps and a total of 1161 career points as of October 28, 2022. Perez’s greatest moment was not one that came with Red Bull, but with Racing Point. The 2020 Sakhir GP saw Perez relegated to plum last without even a sliver of hope of ending up on the podium, let alone win. However, what the Mexican did at the time was nothing short of extraordinary. From last, Perez drove like a lion, passing cars at almost every corner, and with a bit of luck on his side, somehow managed to finish not only on the podium, but on the top step.
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Pedro Rodrguez was widely regarded as the best wet-weather driver of his generation. He was considered the bravest driver in motorsport, along with Jo Siffert, and an example of this was the two touching through the then-very narrow and very dangerous Eau Rouge corner in the rain in their 917s at the start of the 1970 1000km of Spa-Francorchamps. Many consider Rodriguez to be Mexico’s greatest racing driver of all time. On July 11, 1971, he was killed in an Interseries sports car race at the Norisring in Nuremberg, West Germany.
Hector Rebaque raced in 58 Formula One World Championship Grands Prix after making his debut on June 5, 1977. He finished with 13 championship points. In 1978 and 1979, he also ran his own Formula One team. Rebaque normally, he raced Lotus, but for the final three races of 1979, he fielded his own car designed by Penske, which he called the HR100. In the middle of 1980, he replaced Ricardo Zunino as Nelson Piquet’s teammate at Brabham, where he stayed for the rest of the 1981 season, finishing 10th in the Championship.
Esteban Gutierrez received his first Formula One test in a BMW Sauber car in December 2009 as part of his prize for winning the Formula BMW Europe championship. Despite the team’s loss of BMW sponsorship for 2010, he joined as an observer for a few race weekends and was placed on the same training programme as race drivers Pedro de la Rosa and Kamui Kobayashi. Later in the season, on September 10, he was officially named the team’s test and reserve driver. On November 16, 2010, he participated in the Abu Dhabi Young Drivers Test, where he set the fourth fastest time of the day, just over six-tenths of a second slower than Kobayashi’s qualifying time. Gutierrez replaced an ailing Perez in the first free practise session at the Indian Grand Prix on October 26, 2012.
