The news Red Bull has fired Liam Lawson after just two starts for the team has been rumoured for days.
But that doesn’t make it any less of a jaw-dropping decision, particularly given how patient Red Bull was with his predecessor Sergio Perez.
Red Bull persisted so long with Perez it arguably cost them a constructors’ championship last year. When, three months ago, Red Bull finally abandoned hope he would turn another poor season around, Horner gave this explanation for why they chose Lawson, who had started just 11 grands prix, as his replacement.
“We felt that Liam’s trajectory, together with his mental strength and resilience, were the right assets to partner Max,” he said. “Because arguably that seat is the toughest in Formula 1, going up against Max Verstappen, who is at the peak of his career.”
No one could reasonably deny Verstappen is a formidable benchmark to be measured against. But Red Bull is uniquely positioned to ensure it can prepare its future drivers better than any of its rivals: It is the only team whose owner also has a second team, which is designed largely to serve that purpose. Red Bull should therefore be the last team on the grid which rushes a driver in only to axe them two rounds later.
The gulf between Lawson and Verstappen in the RB21 was undeniably wide. The newcomer was over a second slower than Verstappen in qualifying at Melbourne, and only whittled that down to three-quarters of a second in Shanghai last weekend. The gap between Lawson and Verstappen over a single lap was always greater than between any other pair of team mates.
The team has announced Yuki Tsunoda as Lawson’s replacement. There will be anxious faces on the Red Bull pit wall if he fails to get any closer than that at Suzuka next week.
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After qualifying in Australia, McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown – never one to pass up an opportunity to make Horner squirm – wondered aloud why Red Bull had promoted Lawson instead of Tsunoda, who parked his car fifth on the grid. “Yuki did a great job,” Brown enthused while speaking to Sky, adding he was “probably the guy who should be in the Red Bull if you look at how he’s performed, but they seem to make some strange driver choices from time to time.”
The race ran in treacherously slippery conditions. Lawson gambled on trying to survive a rain shower on slick tyres, but spun into a wall at turn two. Afterwards Alexander Albon, who knows first-hand the difficulty of going up against Verstappen in a Red Bull, looked on his efforts sympathetically.
“It’s very early to say how he’s going to do,” he said. “I think, for everyone out there, the conditions and the general format of qualifying now make things very tight.
“Firstly, let’s start with the fact that qualifying is closer than ever, which is great for everyone. But it also means that if you’re just a little bit off, you’re likely going to be out in Q1.
“Then in the race, there’s not much to say. Everyone was struggling out there. I think, especially for the rookies and the ones with a little bit less experience, they were on the back foot for most of Sunday. So I think we need to give him a bit of time to get up to speed.”
To begin with, Horner appeared to agree with Albon’s assessment. “You can’t judge Liam on what we’ve seen so far,” he said after the race. “It’d be very unfair to do that.
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“He’s had a really difficult run so far. Let’s see about the race tomorrow, and then of course, as we get to tracks that he starts to know, I think he’ll start to come alive.”
But now we know Lawson will not make it to the tracks he knows as a Red Bull driver. What changed Horner’s mind so quickly about the importance of seeing Lawson on tracks he knows? And, perhaps more to the point, why didn’t Lawson have more relevant experience when he got the chance in the first place?
Tsunoda may be a year older than Lawson but they came up through the junior categories together. Lawson insisted he had the upper hand but realistically there was often little to separate them.
But Red Bull put Tsunoda on the fast track to F1 after he out-scored Lawson in the 2019 Formula 3 championship. They promoted him to Formula 2 the next year and Formula 1 the year after that.
Lawson’s progress was slower. He had another year in F3, then two in F2. By the end of 2022, Red Bull had a vacancy to fill at their second F1 team (then called AlphaTauri), and Lawson seemed an obvious choice for an promotion into F1.
But instead they sent him off to Japan’s Super Formula series. If, at this stage, Red Bull were seriously contemplating the possibility their junior driver might join their top team two years down the line, why didn’t they place him at other F1 squad in 2023?
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Instead, Red Bull went to some lengths to find an alternative to Lawson. They flirted with Colton Herta, despite his insufficient superlicence points tally which made him ineligible. Then they went outside their young driver programme to hire Nyck de Vries.
But less than half a season later Red Bull decided de Vries wasn’t up to scratch. By now another candidate had emerged for the seat Lawson wanted, and Daniel Ricciardo duly replaced Lawson. Fate intervened when Ricciardo injured his hand three races into his comeback and Lawson finally got his chance to make an F1 debut which, until then, Red Bull had seemed strikingly reluctant to grant.
Red Bull’s decision to axe Lawson is therefore the third peculiar call it has made regarding his career development: Why not give him an F1 drive in 2023 when the chance was there? Why promote him to Red Bull at the end of last year when Tsunoda had started eight times as many races and looked every bit as quick? And why give up on him after just two appearances, both at circuits he had no prior experience of?
Few of Red Bull’s decisions during Lawson’s career to date made much sense. If a team is cutting a driver loose after two rounds the fault clearly rests less with the driver and more on those who hired him for misjudging his preparedness so badly. The only team on the grid which enjoys the luxury of a second junior F1 squad to develop young talent has no excuse for getting this so wrong.
No doubt Horner will not enjoy being reminded his decision to drop Lawson for Tsunoda indicate Brown was right. But it’s not only Red Bull’s team principal who has a say in these calls.
Helmut Marko, the ex-F1 racer who oversees Red Bull’s young driver programme, appears to relish slating the efforts of drivers a quarter of his age. Asked before the season began to rate the rookie class of 2025 he dismissed Alpine’s Jack Doohan as a C-grade talent who would be replaced before the end of the year.
He said nothing about Lawson’s potential to complete as little as one-twelfth of the season, though. It’s surely time for a trenchant, clickbait-friendly assessment of Marko’s role in Red Bull’s failure to find an adequate team mate for its star driver.
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