At this point you have to think there really is something up with the second seat at Red Bull. I wonder if they tailor the car completely around Max and his driving style, so much that the second driver can get a handle on it. With Perez only getting one season in this car (since next year it will be completely different) I guess we won't see how he would do with more experience
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Red bull have always wanted a clear number one. That’s why Webber was treated the way he was. But he was at least put up a fight. We saw what happened when Danny was fighting close with max, he was basically forced out. Helmut was probably a big fan of the 90s-00s Ferrari and wanted to resemble that model of driving.
I feel the reality is not quite as sinister as this suggests. Yes it's commons sense that a clearly defined driver hierarchy is the most effective way to reliably challenge for a championship (hello McLaren 2007), but I think the nature of the second Red Bull seat has a sinister and less nefarious explanation.
Formula 1 is about engineers and designers, even more so than drivers. Adrian Newey has been at Red Bull since 2006 and his design philosophies have dominated the structure of the team. I see it as being far less about Marko wanting to replicate Ferrari and far more plausible that it's Newey believing in his designs and wanting drivers capable of taking his concepts in the desired directions.
It's often said that teams design cars around drivers (such as Red Bull designing the car around Max) - that's sort of accurate, but doesn't quite tell the full story. A car designer will concepts and directions in mind based upon their own philosophies and understandings, which will naturally result in a car with specific characteristics. Lets say we have a designer that builds a car that tends towards oversteer. If you then have two drivers on the team with different preferences, one of them will lose out. For example, you could never put Verstappen and Alonso in the same team as they have completely different driving styles and wants in a car. Verstappen wouldn't have been able to match Alonso's performance in the Renault, and the same goes for if Alonso was to be in the current Red Bull. If you have a designer and a driver agreeing in the direction of development, those two will naturally overpower the wishes of a second driver with a different idea of what they need in a car.
The other part of this is the fact that Max Verstappen has spent his entire F1 career except for 1 season in a Red Bull - and that 1 season was in a Red Bull affiliated car. Beyond that, he has only 1 other season in a race car full stop and finally, his youth is a big part of it - he has been driving a Red Bull F1 car since he was 17 years old and as such, hasn't had to unlearn any specific habits, unlike his teammates who have all had many years in different cars and teams. Take Perez, for example, who has just come from a car with a completely different concept (the "pink Mercedes") which he had only 1 season to learn before jumping into a totally new car. With that in mind, I think he's actually doing reasonably well.
Another example of this is Norris at McLaren. There has been a lot of talk about that car having specific qualities that a driver needs to accommodate to extract performance. Norris hasn't had experiences in other cars to unlearn, unlike Ricciardo and Sainz.
All part of the fun of F1.
