Perez says Aston Martin exists because of 2018 rescue

Sergio Perez says Force India would have gone bankrupt in 2018, and today’s Aston Martin Formula 1 team would not exist, if he and his manager Julian Jakobi had not pushed the outfit into administration during the season.

Speaking on the High Performance Podcast, Perez described a team in severe financial distress under Vijay Mallya, with staff jobs under threat and his own salary unpaid for the entire year. He said the situation became critical when Jakobi told him an unpaid supplier had filed, or was set to file, a winding-up petition that could have shut the company down entirely.

“I didn’t know anything about law, but I was owed some money,” Perez said. “They didn’t pay my salary for the entire year.” He said the alternative to administration was bankruptcy, which would have meant “all the people, all the team” losing their jobs. “At the time, it was Force India, which is now Aston Martin,” he said. “Aston Martin wouldn’t exist.”

Perez said the rescue effort unfolded in the middle of the 2018 campaign, turning race weekends into a balancing act between legal meetings and driving. He said the issue ran through the summer race after race, with talks with lawyers sometimes lasting until just before he got in the car. In one case, he said, he was with lawyers “literally” until qualifying; before another race, he was in meetings instead of with his engineers because he felt he had to help save the team.

He also said he addressed the squad directly because of how the move could be perceived. “It sounds bad, the driver is putting the team in administration,” Perez said. He told staff: “I’m doing this for all of you. If we stayed like this, all of you would lose your jobs. So this was the only way.”

Once the High Court in London placed the Silverstone-based team into administration, Perez said it had 90 days to find a buyer. Lawrence Stroll’s consortium eventually purchased the team, which was rebranded as Racing Point in 2019 before becoming Aston Martin in 2021.

For Perez, that chain of events is the point. He said the administration process was fundamental to the team’s survival, turning what looked like collapse in 2018 into the foundation of the Aston Martin operation now on the grid.