How long do you think Red Bull will give Liam Lawson to get up to speed before contemplating a switch? – Jon
It rather looks as if their patience has already run out. Red Bull are to discuss Lawson’s future this week, and there is a strong possibility he will be dropped for the next race in Japan.
If they go through with it, it will be regarded as a quite remarkable decision, which raises serious questions about the management at Red Bull Racing.
To understand why, let’s rewind.
In May last year, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner decided to re-sign Sergio Perez on a two-year contract taking him to the end of 2026.
This was despite the fact that the Mexican was struggling as Max Verstappen’s team-mate, and that the 2024 season looked to be going the same way as the year before – a bright start from Perez, and then an alarming slump in form.
Horner could have brought in Carlos Sainz, who was a free agent following Ferrari’s decision to sign Lewis Hamilton. But he remembered the tension between the Sainz and Verstappen camps when they were team-mates at Toro Rosso in 2015 and decided he did not want go there again.
Re-signing Perez, Horner’s theory went, would give him the confidence to recover his form.
The strategy failed spectacularly. Perez’s performances fell off a cliff, and the team slumped to third in the constructors’ championship despite Verstappen winning a fourth world title by 63 points.
Verstappen only won twice in the final 14 races of the year because the car lost competitiveness and became difficult to drive. Hence Perez’s struggles.
But Horner and Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko decided that Perez had had his day and they needed to make a change.
They paid him off – to the tune of many millions of dollars – and signed Lawson.
They picked the New Zealander over his much more experienced team-mate at the junior Racing Bulls team, Yuki Tsunoda, because they believed he had a mental toughness the Japanese lacked.
Lawson has had a dire start to the season. He qualified 18th at the season-opener in Melbourne, where he crashed out of the race, and last in both the sprint and grand prix in China, failing to make much progress in either event.
But Verstappen is also struggling – at least relatively. He is not hiding his belief that the car is the slowest of the top four teams – indeed he implied pretty strongly in China that he believed it may not be as fast as the Racing Bull.
The Red Bull is nervous on corner entry, has mid-corner understeer and is snappy on exits. And the team don’t seem to know how to fix it.
Verstappen likes a sharp front end, but he doesn’t want the car to behave like this. But he can cope, and get a lap time out of it. Lawson cannot, at least not yet.
Lawson was talking in China as if he already knew the writing was on the wall.
“It’s just (got) a very small window,” he said. “It’s hard, you know – it’s hard to drive, to get it in that window. I’d like to say that with time that’ll come – I just don’t have time to do that. It’s something I need to get on top of.”
If Red Bull drop him after two races, the management will have some serious explaining to do.
If signing him was the right decision in December, why is it the wrong decision now, they will be asked. If Tsunoda is the driver replacing him, the question becomes even starker.
And if instead they choose Frenchman Isack Hadjar, who has impressed as Tsunoda’s rookie team-mate in the first two grands prix, well, that’s surely too early.
Equally, if the first-order problem is the car – as it seems to be – why blame the driver?
