Finding the right #2 driver is as much art as science. Teams need someone talented enough to score podiums, and savvy enough to understand their role. Make a mistake, and your #1 driver can spend the season dragging dead weight, particularly in the fight for the constructor's title. Which brings us to Sergio Pérez (who just announced he'll be leaving Red Bull).
Red Bull Racing brought Pérez aboard for 2021 to complement then-wunderkind Max Verstappen. Over that season and the next two, the Mexican driver largely held up his end of the bargain, delivering podiums and backing a dynastic run for Red Bull and Verstappen. Especially in 2022 and 2023, Sergio Pérez represented the ideal No. 2 driver — a constructor’s championship cheat code.
Then 2024 happened.
Where Pérez scored between 32 and 40 percent of Red Bull’s points each of his first three years with the team, he was an anchor in 2024, delivering a paltry 26.1 percent of the team’s 581 points. Red Bull slipped to third in the constructors’ standings despite Verstappen hoisting his fourth consecutive driver’s title. As Verstappen clinched his fourth world championship at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Pérez notched a single point. The man who'd been a bear as a #2 driver had become an albatross.
It all made us wonder: Where did Pérez's woeful season stack up in the annals of bad campaigns by a top driver’s team-mate? So we crunched the numbers, looking at data from every Formula 1 season, to figure out out which team-mates had been the least helpful for the contending teams. Turns out, since 1958, 14 teams have finished in the top two of the constructor’s championship with one driver scoring 75 percent (or more) of the team's points.
Below are the most lopsided F1 driver tandems ever. The good news — for Checo, at least — is that there have been worse team-mates than his 2024 run. Just not by much.
The Least Helpful team-mates Ever: 1972 Lotus
Emerson Fittipaldi: 61 points (100%)
David Walker and Reine Wisell: 0 points (0%)
Meet the gold standard for ineffective team-mates in Formula 1. Fittipaldi might have known he was in for a solo show when the FIA disqualified Walker from the year’s first race, the Argentine Grand Prix, for receiving outside assistance. He single-handedly dragged the team to the title when his team-mates had extremely trouble staying eligible for races, let alone finishing them with their cars intact.
In a season with only 12 races, Fittipaldi won five and claimed the constructors’ championship all by himself. Walker was the primary freeloader, never finishing better than ninth and retiring in each of his last four starts. Wisell replaced him in the midst of that run of ignominy and couldn’t score points for Lotus, either.
The Rotating Door: 1963 Lotus
Jim Clark: 54 points (98.2%)
Rest of team: 1 point (1.8%)
The 1963 season saw the first of Clark’s two driver’s championships, winning seven of 10 grands prix (while also taking seven poles). And for constructor’s championship purposes, he was the only driver that mattered, as the team turned into a carousel of #2 pilots: fellow Brits Trevor Taylor, Peter Arundell, and Mike Spence, as well as Mexican Pedro Rodríguez. Taylor scored exactly one point thanks to a sparkling sixth-place finish in Monaco to open the season. Of course, the FIA only counted a team’s top driver in a grand prix toward the constructor standings in 1963, so even Taylor’s single point wound up being irrelevant.
Schumacher's Anchor: 1994 Benetton
Michael Schumacher: 92 points (89.3%)
Jos Verstappen, JJ Lehto, and Johnny Herbert: 11 points (10.7%)
In lugging around a subpar team-mate this season at Red Bull, Max Verstappen is perhaps paying a debt taken on by his father 30 years ago. That season, Jos Verstappen spent most of the year as the team’s No. 2 to a young Schumacher — though that wasn’t the original plan. JJ Lehto was meant to be Schumacher’s partner, but a preseason injury resulted in Verstappen taking the seat.
Things went well for Michael Schumacher: he won his first world driver’s championship, beating out Damon Hill by a single point after both men retired from the season-ending Australian Grand Prix following a crash with each other. (Schumacher, who had everything to gain by crashing out with Hill, has often been accused of orchestrating the collision.)
It all went less well for Verstappen the Elder, and Benetton. The team finished 15 points behind Williams for second in the constructor’s title. Jos Verstappen wasn’t around to see it happen; Benetton replaced him with Johnny Herbert for the final two races in the hopes of making a final push. Verstappen lost his seat before the next season began.
The Andretti Incident: 1993 McLaren
Ayrton Senna: 73 points (86.9%)
Michael Andretti and Mika Häkkinen: 11 points (13.1%)
Ayrton Senna finished second in the world championship in this season, 26 points behind Alain Prost. McLaren also came in second to Prost’s Williams team, but the margin in that race was much bigger: 168 points for Williams, 84 for McLaren. Michael Andretti brought little to the table, finishing 11th in the championship, with as many retirements (seven) as points. McLaren swapped him out for Mika Hakkinen for the final three races, with the Finn sandwiching a P3 finish at the Japanese Grand Prix between two retirements. Andretti never drove again in Formula 1, leaving his lousy ‘93 performance opposite Senna to stand as the American’s only F1 record.
The Senna Tragedy: 1994 Williams
Damon Hill: 91 points (77.1%)
Rest of team: 27 points (22.9%)
This season, of course, wears an asterisk of tragic proportions.
Williams started the season with dynamite duo: three-time champion Ayrton Senna and an ascendant Damon Hill (who would win his first title two years later in 1996). Senna’s death in the season’s third race, at the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola, threw the world into mourning, and Williams into chaos.
Amidst the pall of Senna’s loss, Damon Hill found himself in a historic title battle with Michael Schumacher, losing out by only one point. Maybe more impressively, Williams secured an astonishing constructors’ title thanks almost entirely to Hill. David Coulthard and Nigel Mansell took their turns filling Senna’s seat, and the two drivers cobbled together a combined 27 points, finishing eighth and ninth respectively in the championship. A bar-bet fact: Mansell, sitting on pole at the finale in Australia, won the race in which Hill and Schumacher crashed out. He called his victory that day “a great relief,” as he continued a stretch of winning at least one race in each year since 1985.
The Worst team-mate of the Millennium: 2004 BAR-Honda
Jenson Button: 85 points (71.4%)
Takuma Sato: 34 points (28.6%)
This duo has the honor of being the most lopsided on a top-two constructor in the 21st century. Button didn’t win a grand prix, but stood on nine podiums; Sato landed just one, a P3 in the United States Grand Prix at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. That was apparently a formative experience for the Japanese star, who later changed racing series and won the Indianapolis 500 in both 2017 and 2020.
The Checo Disaster: 2024 Red Bull
Max Verstappen: 429 points (73.8%)
Sergio Pérez: 152 points (26.2%)
Technically, Pérez's 2024 season doesn't count for our worst-team-mate rankings because Red Bull finished third (not second) in the constructor's championship, behind McLaren and Ferrari. But let's not let rules get in the way of recognizing his futility. Despite a torrid start to the season — four podiums in the first five races — Perez collapsed soon therafter, logging five DNFs (and no podiums) in the final 17 grand prix, including the last two races. The Mexican driver’s eighth-place finish in the drivers’ standings this year was the widest gap between a No. 2 driver and his title-winning team-mate since Jos Verstappen took 10th behind Schumacher in 1994.
But if Pérez’s brutal season, in which he managed only 26.2% of his team’s point, is technically inadmissible, his 2021 season with Red Bull can be entered into evidence. As Verstappen won the drivers’ title in Abu Dhabi and Mercedes retained the team crown, Pérez managed just 32.5 percent of Red Bull’s points. Oh, what Christian Horner would’ve given to get that much out of Pérez this year.
The most even points split in F1 history: 1984 McLaren
Niki Lauda: 72 points (50.2%)
Alain Prost: 71.5 points (49.8%)
Let’s end this list on a somewhat positive note.
In 1984, the world witnessed what may be the most even-handed effort by two Formula 1 team-mates ever, as Niki Lauda and Alain Prost won the constructor's title with only a half-point separating their totals.
That half-point, of course, made a difference in Prost’s season. Lauda took the driver’s title over Prost largely because of the Frenchman's own actions. During the Monaco Grand Prix, as rain poured down and a charging Ayrton Senna threatened to overtake the race-leading Prost, the Frenchman pressed for the race to be shortened. He got his wish, but only half points (4.5 for Prost, instead of nine) were awarded to the top six finishers. Had he finished the full race in second, Prost would have received six points.
Since 1984, a couple teams have come close to splitting constructor’s points while taking the title. In 1986, Williams tallied 70 points from Nigel Mansell and 69 from Nelson Piquet for the championship. And in 2016, Mercedes won with 385 from Nico Rosberg and 380 from Lewis Hamilton.
No team has ever finished in the top two of the constructor standings with a perfect 50/50 driver point split. It may not even be a worthwhile goal to have two viable #1 drivers (as McLaren may soon discover). But Red Bull will certainly be hoping for a more balanced duo than it could muster in 2024.
