David Coulthard: Sergio Perez has to up his game or accept being Red Bull's second driver

David Coulthard has called for Sergio Perez to learn how to catch Max Verstappen over the winter or be faced with accepting his role as a second driver at Red Bull, a position he doesn't think is a bad idea for the 33-year-old Mexican.

Perez began the season in fine form, winning two of the opening four races but after the Miami Grand Prix, his season fell off the rails as he missed the third stage of qualifying in five of the following races whilst Verstappen embarked on an 10-race winning run.

The Guadalajara driver would go on to finish the season closer to Logan Sargeant, last of the regular drivers, than Verstappen. Even if you doubled Perez's points total, he would have finished five points behind the Dutchman who took his third world championship in a row.

"The gap between Checo [Perez] and Max on average was just over three tenths," Coulthard said to media. "So Checo wasn't as far away from his team-mate as some, but unfortunately for him of course, when Max was winning, and he's not finishing second, it really puts a very difficult spotlight on him.

"He survived it, but he's definitely going to, in my opinion, have to do some serious work over the winter to fully understand or accept the differences between himself and Max."

Perez's marketing mistakes

Coulthard, who raced in Formula 1 between 1994 and 2008 taking 13 wins, believed that Perez's team got his marketing wrong by promoting someone as a championship contender against the formidable Verstappen.

"At the beginning of the year, he was talking about World Championship battles and he was kind of getting his shoulders and his chest out," Coulthard added. "And I suspect part of that was his management team who are not only there to see him trying to win grands prix, but they are there to sell him commercially.

"So if the message is this guy is a World Champion in wait, then that helps in negotiations. I think now they probably need to take a slightly different view, which is he is the best partner to a Max, a phenomenon.

"Then you could knuckle down in the way that Eddie Irvine did with [Michael] Schumacher or Gerhard Berger did with Ayrton Senna, two examples of drivers who just accepted they weren't as quick as their team-mates.

"That allowed them actually to get some really good stability within the team and relax into doing some great performances and winning grands prix."