Nearly thirty years passed between Héctor Rebaque’s last Grand Prix start and the day Sauber put out a press release naming its new driver. Thirty years—a whole lifetime for a country that once regularly sent drivers to the Formula 1 grid, then simply stopped.
Rebaque ended his career in 1981, driving for Brabham—a team owned at the time by Bernie Ecclestone. The Mexican’s best result was three fourth-place finishes in a season, and by the standards of that era, it was a solid but unremarkable record. After he left, the Mexican flag simply vanished from the “nationality” column on the starting sheets. Not for a couple of years, not for a decade—for an entire era. Formula 1 went through the turbo era, Senna’s death, Schumacher’s arrival, Ferrari’s dominance, the aerodynamic revolution, the switch to hybrid engines. Mexico watched from the sidelines the whole time.
The reasons were systemic. The Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez operated in the country, but there was simply no national driver-development program capable of pushing a racer through the European single-seater series. Mexican motorsport existed in its own bubble—NASCAR Mexico, local touring-car championships—and no one built a bridge to the big European ladder, from karting through Formula 3 and GP2. There was no shortage of talent. Infrastructure, though—that was another matter. It was like having an oil field without a pipeline: the resource is there, but there’s nowhere to send it.
Escuderia Telmex—a program funded by the Slim family’s telecommunications empire—was created to be precisely that missing pipeline. Its mission was stated plainly: find young Mexican drivers, move them to Europe, secure seats in the right championships, and guide them to the level where Formula 1 teams would notice them. Not charity, not a one-off sponsorship deal for one particular kid—a systematic project to put an entire country back on the map of world motorsport.
Sergio Pérez was, in essence, the first graduate of that program to reach the summit. His route through the European series reads like a textbook example of why programs like this exist. British Formula 3, National Class: 14 wins—a series record. The International Class of that same Formula 3 in 2008: fourth place, at eighteen years old, in a championship where he was competing against drivers with far more experience on European circuits. Then GP2 Asia, where he became the youngest race winner. And finally GP2—the main stepping stone before Formula 1—where Pérez finished runner-up with four wins, including Monaco. Winning at Monaco in GP2 is a calling card that cannot be forged. Narrow streets, barriers inches from the wheels, zero margin for error. I’ve always had a soft spot for a young driver who can win precisely there—it says more about a cool head than any telemetry ever could.
To understand why the Swiss team from Hinwil signed a twenty-year-old Mexican, you have to remember what state Sauber was in by the autumn of 2010. Two years earlier, BMW—which had bought the team from Peter Sauber in 2005—announced its withdrawal from Formula 1. Sauber bought the team back, but it was the rescue of a drowning man, not a triumphant return. The budget was slashed drastically, the factory backing of the Bavarian giant evaporated, and the team found itself in a position familiar to every privateer outfit in the paddock: it had to build a competitive car while also finding the money to make sure that car got out onto the track at all.
In that situation, a driver backed by a serious sponsorship package is a godsend. But Sauber, under Sauber, had always been known for not taking outright “wallets”—drivers whose sole virtue was the thickness of their checkbook. The team developed talent: Kimi Räikkönen, Felipe Massa, and Robert Kubica all passed through its cockpit. Its reputation as a school for young drivers was no less valuable to Sauber than its wind tunnel. Taking on a talentless but wealthy driver would have meant destroying that reputation.
Pérez solved both problems at once. The partnership agreement with Telmex—whose chairman was Carlos Slim Domit—meant the logos of the telecom group and its associated brands would appear on the car, while a life-giving flow of cash would enter the team’s budget. But behind those logos stood a driver with a real record: GP2 runner-up, British Formula 3 record-holder, Monaco winner. Sauber was getting both money and speed—a combination rarer in Formula 1 than rain in Bahrain.
On October 4, 2010, a press release from Hinwil announced that Sergio Pérez would partner Kamui Kobayashi in the 2011 season. A twenty-year-old Mexican—and a Japanese driver who himself had only been with the team for a second year. The pairing looked like a bet on youth and aggression, and there was calculation in it: both drivers cost less than veterans, both brought sponsorship money from their home countries, both were fast enough not to disgrace the team. At the same time, Esteban Gutiérrez—another Escuderia Telmex protégé—was named reserve driver. The program worked like an assembly line: one Mexican in a race cockpit, another waiting on the bench.
The paddock’s reaction was predictable. Cynics talked about a “bought seat.” Formula 1 is an environment where such labels are slapped on instantly and take years to peel off. Any driver backed by a corporate sponsor from his country is automatically branded a “pay driver,” and the only way to prove otherwise is on the track—with the stopwatch, with points, with podiums. But in Pérez’s case, the facts were stubborn: four GP2 wins are not daddy’s money. They are real work done with the right foot and the head.
The rest of Pérez’s career is a story in itself, but its outline matters for understanding what the decision of October 4, 2010 became. The cautious, calculating rookie who spent his early seasons learning to preserve tires and finish in the points gradually turned into one of the most dangerous drivers in the paddock. A move to McLaren, a return to the midfield with Force India, then an invitation to Red Bull Racing at the end of 2020, where he found himself alongside Max Verstappen during the team’s period of absolute dominance.
Six Grand Prix wins. World championship runner-up in 2023. For a kid who, thirty years earlier, would not even have had anyone to send him to Europe—the kind of result that takes your breath away. I’ve always wondered: did twenty-year-old Pérez, posing for photographs in Hinwil in October 2010, realize that he was carrying the weight of an entire generation of Mexican fans? That every retirement would be interpreted as proof that the cynics had been right, and every point as vindication for the entire Escuderia Telmex program?
Formula 1 loves beautiful narratives about lone geniuses: a boy from a poor family gets into a kart, beats everyone, joins the best team. Reality is more complicated. Behind Pérez stood not a fairy tale, but an engineering project—a program designed to ensure that a talented driver from a country without single-seater infrastructure could make the entire journey from karting to the starting grid. Telmex invested not in one driver, but in a system: Gutiérrez, too, made it to Formula 1 a few years later. The Mexican Grand Prix returned to the calendar in 2015, and the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez was once again filled by a crowd of one hundred thousand.
The thirty-year pause ended not because one talented kid from Guadalajara happened to be fast enough. It ended because someone had the idea to build a system that found that kid, trained him, carried him across the ocean, and put him in front of a team that needed precisely that combination—speed and money. Sauber got a budget and a future star. Telmex got an advertising platform and a national hero. Mexico got a driver who, thirteen years after that press release from Hinwil, would finish second in the world championship. And Rebaque—the last Mexican in Formula 1 before Pérez—had long since gone into business by then and was probably watching the broadcasts from a different chair.