Pérez signed to Cadillac until 2029, reaches his 300th Grand Prix at home in Mexico City
Paseo de la Reforma will close for Sergio Pérez on Wednesday 28th October. From 10:00 local time, a Cadillac Formula One car will run along one of Mexico City’s great avenues, a show run staged to celebrate a milestone that arrives four days later at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez.
On Sunday 1st November, Pérez will start his 300th F1 Grand Prix. He will do it at home, on a weekend that regularly draws more than 400,000 fans through the gates, after 15 seasons of F1 entries.
He will also do it point-less after 18 rounds, in a car that has yet to score. Both facts belong in the same story, and it starts a long way from Reforma.
From Guadalajara to Germany at 15
Pérez was born in Guadalajara on 26th January 1990, the son of a former stock car racer, and started karting at six. At 15, he moved to Germany to chase a single-seater career. In 2007, he won the National Class of the British Formula 3 International Series.
His F1 debut came with Sauber Ferrari at the 2011 Australian Grand Prix. A year later, he was standing on podiums. He took three for the team in 2012, including a second place in Malaysia behind Fernando Alonso, and McLaren came calling for 2013.
It went badly. McLaren finished the season without a podium and moved on from him after one year. Force India picked him up for 2014, and five seasons there, followed by two with the same under the Racing Point name, built the reputation that still defines him: a driver who looked after his tyres better than almost anyone and came alive when a race turned chaotic.
F1 returned to Mexico in 2015 and Pérez was on the grid for it, finishing eighth for Force India. Mexico finally had a home race to go with its home driver.
Those midfield years were never glamorous, but they were consistent. Pérez took points off cars that had no business scoring them, collected podiums in the unlikely places and kept his name in the conversation for bigger seats.
The win that took 190 starts
By 2020, he was fourth in the championship, and Racing Point had already decided to replace him with Sebastian Vettel for the following season. At the Sakhir Grand Prix in December, he dropped to last on the opening lap and won anyway.
It was his 190th start, a record wait for a first victory at the time, and the first win by a Mexican driver since Pedro Rodríguez in 1970. Rodríguez and his brother Ricardo are the names on the circuit Pérez will race at on Sunday.
Red Bull signed him for 2021, choosing him over Alex Albon.
Red Bull: Wins, podiums and one very large shadow
The Red Bull years gave Pérez almost everything the rest of his career is measured against, and his most famous contribution to them did not show up in the results at all.
During the 2021 title decider in Abu Dhabi, he held Lewis Hamilton up for long enough that Verstappen could close the gap, a defensive drive that became part of the story of how that championship was decided.
Away from that night, the results were strong enough to stand alone. He won in Baku in 2021, then finished third at the Mexico City Grand Prix behind Max Verstappen and Hamilton, the first Mexican to stand on the podium at his home race. He did it again in 2022, in the same order.
That year he also won at Monaco and in Singapore and finished third in the championship with 305 points. In 2023 came victories in Jeddah and Baku, poles in Jeddah and Miami and second place in the standings with 285 points, the best finish of his career.
Five of his six wins have come on street circuits, where walls punish impatience and tyre care pays. It is a narrower talent than the one Verstappen carried, but a real one, and it helped Red Bull to the constructors’ titles in 2022 and 2023.
That shadow never moved. Verstappen finished ahead of him in the standings in all four of their seasons as teammates, and by 2024 the slide was complete: eighth in the championship on 152 points, no wins, and a parting of the ways with Red Bull in December.
The 2025 Mexico City Grand Prix went ahead without him, the first since the race returned to the calendar in 2015 that he was not on the grid for.
Cadillac: A different kind of 300
In August 2025, Cadillac confirmed Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as its first drivers. The team is the grid’s 11th, running Ferrari power units until General Motors brings its own engine in 2029. 2026 has been about survival and small gains rather than results.
The team’s best finish of the year belongs to Bottas, a 13th place in China, which says plenty about the level they are working at.
Monaco came closest. Pérez crossed the line tenth after a strong run following the red-flag restart, only to be demoted to 15th for a false start, which handed Alonso the single point. Team principal Graeme Lowdon called the drive an “incredible testament to the resolve of the team.”
Austin brought an upgrade package Pérez said gave the team “a bit of hope.” It brought 19th place, a lap down, with Bottas stopping late with a suspected power unit problem and Cadillac still last in the constructors’ standings.
Pérez is honest about what that looks like from the grandstands. Fans used to seeing him fight for wins are watching him run at the back, and he admits it is hard for them to stomach. He also says they are fully behind the project.
“How lucky I am to get my 300th at home,” he said before the triple-header began.
The week of his 300th has brought news of its own. On Wednesday, 28th October, Cadillac announced that Pérez has signed a multi-year extension that keeps him with the team until at least 2029, two seasons beyond the end of his original deal in 2027.
That is also the year General Motors' own power unit is due to replace the Ferrari engines, so he is now tied to the project through one of its biggest changes. He described building a team from scratch as slow work that takes patience, and called the progress so far rewarding.
What Mexico City has given him
His home record is not the tidy story the Red Bull podiums might suggest. Nine starts since 2015 have produced six points finishes, two podiums, two retirements and one 17th place in 2024.
The sequence runs eighth, 10th, seventh, a retirement with brake failure in 2018, seventh, then third in 2021 and 2022. In 2023, his race ended on the first lap after contact with Charles Leclerc. Mexico has seen him at his best and at his worst, and kept turning up.
The home races that went well tend to share a pattern. He finished ahead of where he started, climbing from ninth to eighth in 2015, from ninth to seventh in 2017 and from 11th to seventh in 2019. It is the same patience that powers the street-circuit wins, applied in front of his own people.
On Sunday, he cannot realistically expect a result to match the occasion. The points are almost beside the point.
No other Mexican driver has come anywhere near this number of starts. For most of F1’s history, Mexico had a handful of drivers and two victories to remember, both won by Rodríguez. Pérez has added six more and given a generation of fans somebody to watch every other weekend.
300 starts is a long time to carry a country. Pérez has carried it through a first win that took 190 attempts, a runner-up finish in the standings, a dismissal and a year away. The people in the grandstands will not be checking the timing screens. They will be watching the No.11 roll onto the grid, and so will he.
Comments