Sergio Perez has made the stunning claim that he was slugged with a whopping £6000 bill for a solitary phone call with a psychologist, after being urged to speak to a mental health professional early on in his turbulent time at Red Bull.

The 35-year-old says he sent the bill to team advisor, Helmut Marko, while saying being Max Verstappen’s teammate is “the worst job there is in F1,” and claiming the whole team was against him by his final season in 2024.

‘Checo’, who returns to the grid with Cadillac this year, was coming off the best season of his career when he replaced Alex Albon at Red Bull in 2021. But he quickly discovered life alongside Verstappen and under then-team principal Christian Horner was anything but straight forward.

When he didn’t get results in his first few races, the team urged him to speak to a psychologist, Perez told the Cracks Podcast as he unloaded on his stint at Red Bull.

“I’m completely open to everything, of course, so I speak (on the phone) to a psychologist,” Perez said in a translated version of the podcast on YouTube.

“(The psychologist) says, ‘Hey, what is your name?’

“(I say) Sergio Perez, so and so. I tell him, ‘Today, I don’t have time for a session, but we’ll talk. Let’s find a time for it.’”

Then came the bill.

“One day, I get to the Red Bull Factory and he tells me, ‘Hey, there’s a receipt here for you, and it’s for six thousand pounds from the psychologist,’” Perez said.

“I told him, ‘Could you send it to Helmut, please, he’ll take care of it’.

“It was six thousand pounds for a phone call.”

After his rocky start in 2021, Perez finished the 2022 season in third and went one better the following year, with Verstappen winning the title each time.

But even that wasn’t good enough, the Mexican claimed.

“At Red Bull, absolutely everything was a problem,” he said. “If you were too quick, that would become a problem, because, clearly, it created a very, very tense atmosphere.

“If I was faster than Max it was always a problem. If I was slower than Max, it was always a problem.

“So, everything became a problem.”

According to Perez, the team’s intense focus on Verstappen came at the expense of even greater success, with the Dutch ace finishing second in the championship standings to Lando Norris last year..

“We had the best team, but unfortunately, everything was destroyed,” he said. “We had the team to dominate for the next 10 years, I think.

“Everything is over now. It was the best team, but it was a complicated team.

“Being Max’s teammate is extremely difficult, but being Max’s teammate at Red Bull is the worst job there is in Formula One, by far.”

The lowest point came in his final season in 2024, when the results once again dried up.

“I looked for answers everywhere, but I knew deep down that when you’re driving a car and thinking about what’s going to happen, and which turn you’re going to crash on, you can’t go fast,” he said.

“On top of that your whole team is against you.

“Publicly it was really, difficult.

“There was so much pressure that year. Christian had some problems, and I was very much the distraction.

“Nobody talked about anything but me, about my performance and how badly I was doing.”

Perez followed Pierre Gasly and Albon out the door of the Red Bull garage at the end of the 2024 season, with Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda going the same way in 2025.

Verstappen will be joined by Izack Hadjar this season, while Perez teams up with fellow veteran Valteri Bottas at the new Cadillac team when the season gets underway in Melbourne in March.