Davis Fang

Sergio Pérez reveals he lived alone at 14 among the truck drivers, too tight on budget to fly home to Mexico between races, until a friend let him live above a new restaurant with the chef “Yeah. All the truck drivers, all the truckies, completely on my own. I was like, you know, I’m only racing on the weekends, you know. So it was really, really tough. And I couldn’t come back to Mexico between races because it was very expensive. I was very tight on budget. So for me, the toughest periods were when the race finished." "I remember like coming back from a race, you know, we had a motor home, and Günther will drive it. I will be next to it. He will like leave me at home. I was like, you know, when is the next race? In two weeks. What I’m gonna do the next two weeks, you know, because they’re in the middle of nowhere. And those periods were very tough." "But then Günther did a restaurant. He was building a restaurant. So he told me, ‘You want to help me to build?’ I was like, ‘Please take me wherever.’ So we start building a restaurant, and then once the restaurant was ready he told me, ‘You want to come, you can live there with the chef on the top floor.’ I was like, for sure, you know, like I could live with someone, I can speak to someone." "It was the worst nightmare for the chef. Imagine a 14-year-old Mexican with the Mexican time zone, you know, because when I was not racing I was just speaking to my friends on the computer, but on their time zone.”