Between the eighth and the ninth, exactly two years, six months and eight days passed, but this time the Mexican
Sergio Pérez
(Racing Point) only waited three weeks to get back on a Formula One podium. And he did it in a big way, achieving his first victory in the queen category fifty years after his compatriot Pedro Rodríguez won the Belgian Grand Prix.
Three Sundays after shining in Turkey, where he was second, Checo, born 30 years ago in Guadalajara (Jalisco), won the second race of Bahrain, the Sakhir Grand Prix, and signed his tenth
drawer
since driving in F1, joining his name to that of Pedro Rodríguez, who in addition to Belgium in 1970 also conquered that of South Africa three years earlier.
The best Pérez at the worst time
Checo Pérez, the heroic podium of the underrated rider
Mexican driver Checo Pérez will leave Racing Point at the end of the season
The Mexican could have already climbed to his tenth podium in F1 just a week ago.
But when he was riding comfortably in third position, the broken engine of his Racing Point prevented him with three laps to go.
Fate corresponded to him and this Sunday he achieved, in his Grand Prix number 193 (he started in 190), his first triumph in F1.
He did it ahead of his old French teammate Esteban Ocon (Renault) and his current colleague, Canadian Lance Stroll.
Sergio, absent in the two tests in Silverstone (England) due to positive endings in covid-19, confirmed that he is still on the path of success.
In his most difficult year.
In which, in the absence of a race, he still does not know what he will do in 2021. And this Sunday, after starting fifth on the shortened track on the outskirts of Manama, the capital of the kingdom of the Arabian Peninsula, he signed up again between the best in motorsports honor division by winning at Sakhir.
The brave driver, who improved his personal score on Sunday, announced last Monday at a telematic press conference from Bahrain that if he does not sign for Red Bull, he will take a sabbatical year in 2021 to seriously think about his future, professionally and personally.
After standing out in the lower categories, the Mexican made his F1 debut in 2011. He did it in Sauber, a team in which he was a teammate of the Japanese Kamui Kobayashi.
That year, including scare in Monaco, he closed it with sixteenth place in the World Cup and with seventh in Silverstone (Great Britain) as his best result.
In his second season, again with Sauber, it took only two races to enter the elite;
after completing a sensational performance in the rainy Sepang, in which he only yielded to double Spanish world champion Fernando Alonso, and celebrated second place in the 2012 Malaysian Grand Prix. That course added two other podiums: he was third in Montreal ( Canada) and second in Monza (Italy).
Two races scored by the already seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton - who did not race this weekend after testing positive for coronavirus - then at McLaren: the team where Pérez replaced him the following year, when the Englishman left for Mercedes to win another six crowns, which he joined the one he had captured in 2008 with the Woking team.
The Mexican did not spend a year all the good that was expected in the Woking team.
He did not get on the podium - England's Jenson Button, the 2009 world champion, neither did - in a season in which his best result was a fifth place in the Indian Grand Prix.
Checo then signed for his current team - with which he faces his seventh year and in which next year, when it was called Aston Martin, his position will be filled by the German Sebastian Vettel.
A team that was then called Force India and that from mid-2018, after entering bankruptcy, was renamed Racing Point.
The change was good, because in the third race he got back on the podium after finishing third, where he won this Sunday: in Bahrain (on his usual track), where Hamilton led a Mercedes double with his then teammate, the German Nico Rosberg .
Pérez, from that partner of another Nico (also German), Hülkenberg, returned to the group of the best ten, in which he had finished two years before at Sauber.
And a year later, when he finished ninth in the 2015 World Cup, he was on the podium again, finishing third in Russia, in the Olympic ring in Sochi (site of the Winter Games a year earlier).
There Hamilton won again, ahead of Vettel, who after leading Red Bull's glorious four-year term was already a Ferrari driver.
2016 had been, so far, the best season in Guadalajara.
He added 101 points - in the absence of a test, he has 125 - and finished seventh, as "the best of the rest" (
the best of the rest
, in English), when it began to be clear that there was a dominant team - Mercedes - and two others - Ferrari and Red Bull - who, hopefully, could also win sometime.
That year, Checo added another two podiums, finishing third in the glamorous Monaco (where Hamilton won and the Australian Daniel Ricciardo, of that in Red Bull, was second) and in the European Grand Prix, in the debutant Baku, the capital. from Azerbaijan.
There Rosberg won ahead of Vettel.
In 2017 he was once again the
best of the rest
by scoring 100 exact points.
But he did not go up to the drawer in a year in which, however, he only failed to score in three of the 20 tests.
"There were two categories and we won the World Cup in ours," Checo declared to the Efe agency at the end of that season, in Abu Dhabi.
Azerbaijan became, in 2018, the only country in which the Mexican - who had Ocon as his partner (second this Sunday, with Renault and with whom sparks flew on more than one occasion) - repeated podium in F1.
This Sunday Bahrain added.
Second that day in Baku was the Finn Kimi Raikkonen, with Ferrari.
The winner, once again: Hamilton.
With the new property that had entered in mid-2018, the year in which the World Cup finished eighth;
Last year Pérez shared garages with Canadian Lance Stroll (the boss's son), in a transitional season, without podiums, in which he finished tenth, but wanting to start a new year.
Despite all the vicissitudes, this Sunday Checo Pérez once again waved the flag of Mexico.
And he claimed his second podium of the year.
The tenth.
With which he celebrated his first triumph in Formula One.