Jaime Alguersuari has spoken about his own memories of leaving the Red Bull stable, and said Liam Lawson needs to understand “you were not a bad driver before.”

Lawson has been rotated to Racing Bulls after just two races as a Red Bull driver, with Yuki Tsunoda set to take his place from the Japanese Grand Prix onwards.

Alguersuari: Liam Lawson needed ‘a little bit of time’ at Red Bull

Alguersuari made his debut for Toro Rosso as the youngest ever Formula 1 driver at the time back in 2009, but was not kept on after the 2011 season, with the team replacing him and Sébastien Buemi with Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Eric Vergne for 2012.

The Spaniard ended his racing career aged 25, making a comparison to having “fallen out of love with this girlfriend who has been with me all these years.”

While he never made the jump to the ‘senior’ squad, with Red Bull having led the standings through Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber during Alguersuari’s stint in Formula 1, he admitted seeing Lawson struggle “takes me back to my memories.”

With this swap back to Racing Bulls incoming, he urged Lawson to work with his new team to find his natural speed again, adding he can’t go from a “hero” to “the worst driver” in such a short space of time.

“Liam is new, he didn’t know the car, he didn’t know the team, he didn’t know the tracks, so you need to give him a little bit of time,” Alguersuari told Formula1.com.

“F1 now is about very small details. [For example], you have to get the tyres into the operating window, otherwise you just don’t have the grip, and you can bury four or five-tenths so easily. If you check Liam’s onboards in Australia and China, you can see that he was struggling for grip everywhere.

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“Liam is not as bad as he looks. You could expect that he was going to struggle at the beginning of the season, and he wouldn’t have been as bad as the season went by. You can’t be a hero and then [become] the worst driver in one or two races.

“It takes me back to my memories.

“At the end of the day, F1 has become so psychological. Bouncing back from that is just about strengthening your head, understanding your positives, your ups, and being super optimistic. You need to understand that you were not a bad driver before.

“You are who you are, you’re developing your career in F1, and there’s much more to see and to come from you. You have to try to remember what you’ve learned in the past, your first races in F1, and try to execute to the maximum level that you’ve done so far.

“I think for Liam now, it comes to a new scenario where he just needs to feel comfort inside the car again, work with the engineers, work with the team, [find] the pace he was missing and try to get there step by step.”

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