As one of Formula 1’s preeminent journeymen, there is plenty of history for Pérez to draw from. So much history, so much racing over the past three decades, that it’s all begun to bleed together. “I will not remember most of them,” he warns, holding the stack of photos. “It’s one I don’t remember, really,” he says, looking down at the first photo. He draws a blank with another one in which he’s holding a trophy. “I don’t remember, but I had just won a race,” he says.
Suddenly, though, the past comes into focus. “This one, I won the national race, a very important race in Monterrey,” he says, studying a photograph from a karting event from his youth in Mexico. “A big race with a lot of very good drivers.”
“Is it unusual for a Mexican to win a race there?” the cameraman asks him, trying to drag more material out of the exceedingly concise driver. But this question elicits the most direct of responses: “Yes.”
Once the shoot has wrapped, Pérez catches a ride with his right-hand man and longtime friend, Luis Aguirre, to the racetrack. Pérez won’t be driving his Formula 1 car today. Instead, he’ll be shuttled through a precisely timed agenda of interviews, marketing duties, and race-week preparations. There will be cameras and recorders in his face at every turn. As we drive the 14 miles through the arid countryside northwest of the city en route to the circuit, Pérez and Aguirre chat about the Olympics in preparation for a marketing video in which the driver will be grilled about the history of the Games.
“They love to make me look stupid,” the 34-year-old driver says with a good-natured laugh. “The more stupid I look, the better.” Later there will be a drivers’ meeting with Formula 1’s governing body. Brad Pitt’s big-budget Formula 1 movie, F1, will be filming here in Budapest this weekend, which means there is a fictional Formula 1 apparatus operating alongside the real one—fake photographers, fake reporters, fake fans, and fake team staffers in addition to the real ones.
