Liam Lawson has been backed to keep the Red Bull seat for at least the Japanese Grand Prix by former driver and, it must be noted, Red Bull ambassador, David Coulthard.

The first-ever Red Bull driver Coulthard pondered over the future of the under-fire Lawson but believes he will get at least one more race behind the wheel.

Liam Lawson given Red Bull future backing by David Coulthard

It was just a few short weeks ago that Lawson was being billed as the answer to a lot of Red Bull’s problems but two races and zero points later, the New Zealander is now thought to be under serious pressure to retain the seat.

Coulthard, who raced for Red Bull from 2005 to 2008 and still retains very strong inside connections, believes Lawson will get to drive in Japan but said the “writing is on the wall” if he does not perform there.

“I feel for him, but this is not a put your arm around the shoulder business. This is a lap time business,” Coulthard said in his capacity as a pundit for Channel 4.

“And the two opportunities he’s had, he hasn’t delivered. He’s got a race to try and pull it back, and he’s got, in my mind, Japan, where he’s raced prior to Formula 1, to show all the skills that got him the seat in the first place.

“But if it doesn’t work there, I think the writing’s on the wall, and that’s tough. We all want to see these guys fulfil their dreams, but you’ve got to deliver.”

The talk around Lawson is not dissimilar to what was being said about Sergio Perez last year as the Mexican failed to keep close to Max Verstappen.

Coulthard said that Perez’s fate, which resulted in his contract being terminated, would be a “sobering” thought for Lawson.

“Emotionally, it doesn’t get worse,” Coulthard said of Lawson’s race in Australia. “In what is the closest thing to his home grand prix, everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

“Here was an opportunity to make good and the gap is just too big. Nobody wants to be last on the grid, but to do it twice in the same weekend, last for the sprint, last for the main event, if he was emotionally close to the edge, I don’t know where he is now.

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“It shows how things move on [that] I had completely forgotten about Checo, but he was that sort of gap away from most of the back end of last year, and it ended up with him basically having his contract removed for this year.

“That’s going to be pretty sobering for Liam Lawson.”

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