Death, taxes and Max Verstappen’s teammate facing rumors of an impending departure; three certainties in life as sure as the rising and setting of the sun.
Liam Lawson’s rough start to life as a Red Bull driver has prompted speculation that he is set to be replaced after just two races. After his new driver toiled to 15th in Sunday’s Chinese Grand Prix — promoted to 12th on paper only after three disqualifications ahead — team boss Christian Horner swerved multiple opportunities to kill rumors that Lawson might be swapped out for Racing Bulls’ Yuki Tsunoda ahead of the latter’s home race, the Japanese Grand Prix on April 6.
“I think everything is purely speculative at the moment,” Horner said on Sunday in Shanghai. “We’ve just finished this race. We’re going to take away the info and have a good look at it … I think Liam still has potential — we’re just not realizing that at the moment.”
It would be a tantalizing twist for Red Bull’s final race in Japan with Honda power, and a long-overdue — if unexpected — opportunity for Tsunoda to finally get the Red Bull chance that has long seemed just out of reach. It would also mark a continuation of the muddled thinking that has plagued almost every driver at the company apart from Verstappen.
A decision either way should come this week.
If the switch happens, Red Bull effectively would be saying it only took two races to conclude that Lawson isn’t the answer, despite insisting last year that just 11 race starts had provided all the data they needed to believe he was. Meanwhile, Tsunoda’s four years of experience and consistently strong form hadn’t been enough — until now, it seems. It’s all so very strange.
Regardless of whether the call is made, the fact that it has been a talking point so early in Lawson’s tenure — and that Red Bull did not shut it down immediately — is telling. No matter how bad the first two races have been, it is foolish to think a driver can prove anything in such a short space of time. It’s the continuation of an ongoing theme for Red Bull Racing and raises a deeper question: how on earth is the company famed for pioneering the concept of the modern-day Formula 1 driver program in this situation again?
Lawson in the eye of the storm
It might only be two races, but Lawson already looks to be drowning in the deep end that Red Bull threw him into. It’s made for tough viewing.
The immediate challenge facing Lawson, and any driver parachuted into that second Red Bull seat, is threefold. First: Verstappen’s immense talent. Second: Red Bull’s increasingly temperamental car, and Verstappen’s freakish ability to outdrive it anyway; former teammate Alex Albon has previously likened the type of car Verstappen wants to a computer mouse, turned up to maximum sensitivity. Third: the precedent, and ongoing narrative, set by those who came before.
After Daniel Ricciardo’s unexpected departure in 2019, Pierre Gasly and then Albon — both graduates of the same junior program Lawson emerged from — flamed out in quick succession. Those two examples prompted a change of tack; Sergio Pérez, a 10-year veteran and race winner, was brought in from outside the Red Bull pipeline. He started strong in 2021 and early 2022, but crumbled in his final two years. By the end of last season, the jokes about Red Bull’s two cars looking like they were competing in different categories were already well worn. Those have been picked straight off the shelf this year with Lawson’s first two appearances.
Lawson was up against it from the beginning. Red Bull’s biggest gremlin in preseason testing happened during his stint in the car, limiting track time, and his debut was on an Albert Park track he had never raced on in any discipline before. China was just a weekend where he never seemed to get going, which can happen for a young driver in a fresh stint with a new team. These should not be excuses — after all, many drivers would leap at the chance to have the opportunity given to Lawson this year — but they are factors that have clearly had an impact on his start.
Then there’s the outside perception. Lawson has not endeared himself to everyone, and there seems to be a remarkable lack of goodwill toward the 23-year-old among F1 fans.
Lawson replaced two of the most popular drivers on the grid — Ricciardo at Racing Bulls and then Pérez at Red Bull — in quick succession and it appears as though large swathes of both fanbases are gleefully watching his slow start to the season. Lawson did nothing but seize the opportunities given to him — first as Ricciardo’s injury stand-in in 2023, then as his full-time replacement a year later — but the optics haven’t played in his favor.
Then, in beating out Tsunoda — who the overwhelming majority viewed as the more deserving candidate to replace Pérez — Lawson has, to some, become the unworthy usurper in the ongoing story of Red Bull’s bizarre driver decisions. Recent comments have likely solidified that perception.
“If I look back over our careers, I was teammates with [Tsunoda] in F3 and I beat him,” he told The Telegraph. “In Euroformula I was teammates with him, [and] in New Zealand, and I beat him there.Then in F1 I think honestly, if I look at all the times he got promoted instead of me in those early years, then no. He’s had his time. Now it’s my time.”
There’s also been drama on track. At last year’s U.S. Grand Prix — Lawson’s first race after taking Ricciardo’s seat — two-time world champion Fernando Alonso took exception to Lawson’s aggressive racing. A week later, in Mexico, Lawson tussled impressively on track with Pérez at the latter’s home race, giving the local hero the middle finger at the conclusion of the race. The defiant racing style helped Lawson’s cause; Horner cited his on-track approach as a key factor in his promotion, although he was quietly rebuked in Red Bull hospitality for the post-race gesture.
Free Yuki
While Lawson was rooted to the bottom of the time sheets for most of the weekend in Shanghai, Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko spoke of Tsunoda’s recent growth.
“Yuki is in the shape of his life,” Marko said. “He’s a different Yuki now than in recent years. He changed management, he has a different approach and is more mature. It took a while for him, but now it seems to be working.”
Lawson’s rotten start to the year has been contrasted with Tsunoda’s brilliance. Two strategic errors from Racing Bulls — one a wet-weather gamble easy to get wrong in Australia, the other a baffling call to make a second stop no one else copied in China — meant he still has zero points to his name, but he’s picked up this year at the level he’s been at for most of the past two seasons, which is consistently fast and impressive.
Christian Horner and Liam Lawson discuss his early struggles in the Red Bull.
In a sport so brilliantly unpredictable, few things have made as little sense as Red Bull’s continued reluctance to put Tsunoda in the top team. What makes the Japanese driver’s continued purgatory in energy-drink-sponsored limbo all the more baffling is that he’s exactly the kind of success story Red Bull’s junior team was designed to produce.
A quick, exciting youngster who has gradually smoothed out his rough edges, Tsunoda has grown across four years (and counting) with the second team — precisely what the Faenza outfit was set up to achieve. He’s worked on making himself a better teammate and better communicator with the team. When Horner and Marko both commented in the past that Tsunoda was too angry on the radio, he worked on not pushing the button on his steering wheel to swear, knowing that he had become one of the TV directors’ favorite characters.
He’s now the most tenured driver in that team. Lawson, by contrast, is the opposite. In the car for the second half of 2023, out of the car for the first half of 2024, then back in again; he deserved a proper, uninterrupted season with the junior team just as much as Tsunoda deserved to finally graduate from it.
With Tsunoda’s contract up at the end of the year, promoting him for 2025 would have felt like a win-win. Either he’s as good as his Racing Bulls form suggests — competitive alongside Verstappen, or at least not totally outclassed — or he joins Pérez and the others in the long list of Verstappen teammates who couldn’t hack it. If it’s the latter, Red Bull could finally cut ties, doubt free, and promote Lawson or Isack Hadjar after a full year of seasoning, and turn to F2 prodigy Arvid Lindblad as the next big hope from the academy pipeline. If Tsunoda steps up and nails it, you’ve just solved your second driver problem for the next few years.
Only, now they’ve complicated it. Jettisoning Lawson now risks doing permanent damage to the Kiwi driver’s confidence, while Tsunoda immediately starts on the back foot with a car that looks like a handful to drive. These factors will be considered this week when Horner sits down to make the decision. If Red Bull thinks Lawson’s spiral is a sign of things to come, the lesson of last year might be enough to push them toward an unprecedented early change.
Source: espn.com