Another year, but the same story for Red Bull’s second driver as Liam Lawson has started life at Milton Keynes in ignominious fashion.

The Kiwi driver was knocked out in the first part of qualifying for the Chinese Grand Prix – a third consecutive occasion in two race weekends as he finished slowest of all in Shanghai, continuing what has been a troubled start to life driving for Red Bull.

Liam Lawson’s Red Bull start echoes those of F1 predecessors

It’s been an eternal issue for Red Bull ever since Max Verstappen arrived at the team almost a decade ago, with the Dutch driver’s talents and temperament allowing him to wrap the squad around him in his quest for titles.

It’s been an approach that has yielded plenty of success, with Verstappen winning four titles in a row since topping Lewis Hamilton in 2021, but this success at elevating Verstappen and allowing him to flourish has come with a cost – namely, that the second driver in the team will always be up against it to succeed.

With the benefit of seniority and experience, Daniel Ricciardo was able to continue in the vein he had already established for himself over the two-and-a-bit years he and Verstappen were teammates but, by 2018, it was becoming clear that it was Verstappen who the team’s weight was behind – triggering Ricciardo’s move away from Red Bull and onwards into eventual midfield anonymity.

The rise of Verstappen, and the alignment of Red Bull with the precocious young Dutchman’s push, saw the team scrabble for a suitable sidekick. Pierre Gasly arrived and crumbled under the weight of expectation, before finding his feet again at Red Bull’s sister team AlphaTauri, and is now a highly-rated midfield runner.

Alex Albon got longer than Gasly but, ultimately, suffered the same fate – a decent start at the team was tempered by high-profile disappointments (for which Albon wasn’t always at fault) and, eventually, Red Bull tried something new.

Turning to a proven quantity in Sergio Perez, an underwhelming maiden season was balanced out by the Mexican stepping up to the plate to spoil Lewis Hamilton’s progress – think Perez’s disruptive drivers in Turkey and Abu Dhabi – and this willingness to work on behalf of the team turned into a four-year stint of relative harmony.

Perez occasionally could put in stints of high performance to ably back Verstappen up, particularly at the start of 2023 where the Mexican even managed to beat Verstappen on track but eventually, seemingly inevitably, his performance dipped. With Red Bull’s RB21 in 2024 proving even too wild a beast for Verstappen to consistently extract its potential, Perez was nowhere and, realising the pressure was on, spiralled to become his own worst enemy.

It was clear a fresh start was needed, but where to turn? Ricciardo had briefly looked capable of stepping back up but there was enough data to suggest the Australian was past his best – to the point where justifying his place on the ‘junior’ team with Racing Bulls was no longer possible.

Hiring externally again would mean the Red Bull junior programme would be somewhat superfluous – after all, what’s the point in signing and developing drivers, only to hit a ceiling upon reaching, if lucky, the Racing Bulls squad? So that meant either Yuki Tsunoda… or Liam Lawson.

On paper, Tsunoda was the better choice. Having overcome pressures in his own career to bounce back from what was a decidedly poor start to his F1 career in 2021 and ’22, Tsunoda rose to the occasion of becoming team leader for Faenza when Gasly left for a new challenge at Alpine.

Becoming a fast and far more consistent performer, he scored two-thirds of the team’s points in 2024 – had his teammate scored the same amount, Racing Bulls could have dreamt about sixth place in the Constructors’ Championship.

But Lawson, who had impressed by performing immediately after replacing Ricciardo as a super-sub in 2023, was given his chance to perform alongside Tsunoda and, while beaten by the Japanese driver, wasn’t completely overshadowed – the Kiwi, given his lack of experience, could be argued as having the potential to have a higher ceiling than Tsunoda.

Added to that is mentality. Tsunoda’s emotional control has always been in question and he blotted his copybook seriously by letting anger get the better of him after the chequered flag at the 2024 Bahrain Grand Prix, accelerating in rage past Ricciardo following a team order.

Given the mental barrage any teammate of Verstappen will face, Red Bull saw Lawson as the more suitable candidate to handle being beaten weekend in, weekend out, while providing capable support without going off the rails.

Liam Lawson admits to ‘needing to get a handle’ on tricky RB21

But it’s unlikely Red Bull expected this theory to be tested quite so comprehensively, or quite so quickly. After a solid but unspectacular test in Bahrain, Lawson qualified 18th in Australia before crashing out of the race after toiling around towards the back for most of the race. Then he qualified last for the Chinese Sprint race, and the Grand Prix itself – three consecutive Q1 eliminations within eight days.

While the RB21 is not the class of the field at this point, Verstappen is proving that it is still a front-running car, but Lawson isn’t even managing to escape Q1 with it. As Sky F1’s Ted Kravitz so bluntly put to Red Bull boss Christian Horner, “You didn’t pay off  [Perez] for this, did you? I mean, the point was to replace [him] with a quicker driver, and is he just not a quicker driver?”

After the fairytale of being given the Red Bull drive, Lawson is quickly discovering the reality of what faced his predecessors in the same cockpit. The reality is the pressure has already ramped up, to the point where performances along these lines quickly make his position untenable – he lacks the benefit of the years of dependability and solidity that Perez had behind him during his annus horribilis last season.

Granted, circumstances have been against Lawson to some extent – he has not raced at Albert Park or the Shanghai International Circuit before, and has had limited practice at both circuits. Losing third practice in Melbourne due to a PU issue put him on the back foot, while tricky weather conditions meant he was never quite comfortable. In China, the Sprint weekend format meant he only had a single hour of practice to learn how his car would work around Shanghai.

But these counter-arguments pale when one looks across to see how fellow rookies like Kimi Antonelli, Gabriel Bortoleto, Isack Hadjar, and Jack Doohan – himself under serious pressure even before the season started – have shown up to immediately put their teammates under pressure.

While these drivers, perhaps aside from Antonelli, aren’t expected to run near the front on a consistent basis, Lawson himself hasn’t been given the target of even matching Verstappen – merely to be close, within a few tenths, of the Dutch driver, while scoring points. Given the car is clearly capable of it, for Lawson to be finishing plum last – that’s not a situation Red Bull can allow for long.

It’s for this reason, rather than any set deadline of needing to find performance, that Lawson admitted he “doesn’t really have time” when he spoke to Sky F1 after his Chinese GP qualifying elimination.

“I think it’s just time,” he said when asked what he needs in order to feel more comfortable behind the wheel of the RB21.

“Unfortunately, I don’t really have time, but it’s just one of those things that me driving a Formula 1 car, takes 100 percent confidence in what you’re doing.”

“It’s not that I don’t feel confident.

“But the window is so small that, right now, I just seem to miss it. I just need to get a handle on it. I don’t know how else to put it, it’s just not good enough.”

What is interesting to note is that Lawson is finding the performance window of the RB21 so small, a window that appears to be much wider than last year’s RB20. Verstappen has felt vastly more comfortable behind the wheel of the RB21, even going so far as to say he felt “at one” with it in Australia. But, for a newcomer like Lawson, the fact he’s finding the wider RB21 operating window so small suggests that what Perez was working with last year must have been minuscule.

Liam Lawson holds hands up over tricky Red Bull start

Either way – it’s not a situation that’s tenable for Red Bull.

Lawson has proven himself an adaptable driver across a wide range of championships, such as Super Formula, Formula 2, Formula 3, DTM, and a bevy of lower-level championships. Whether it be Lawson wilting under the pressure, given the expectation of him to jump in and perform, or the RB21 being unique to the point where no one but Verstappen can drive it quickly, it’s imperative Red Bull responds before it’s too late to fight for the title against the two-driver teams performing like McLaren, Ferrari, and Mercedes.

It’s to his credit that Lawson is owning the situation he’s finding himself in. While acknowledging that the car is tricky for him to adjust to, he told PlanetF1.com at the end of last season that, as professional racing drivers, it’s expected that a top-level F1 driver should be able to adapt to anything – a position he re-iterated speaking to Sky F1.

“It’s just really tough, honestly,” he said. “I think the window is really small. That’s known, but it’s not an excuse, like, I’ve got to get a handle of it.

“To be honest, it’s still not good enough – to be having those issues, and that’s the reason that we get knocked out, we should be fast enough on our first lap.

“It shouldn’t be an issue, I just need to get on top of it.”

“It’s car characteristics, the way that the car drives. But, obviously, if Max is able to drive it, then I should be able to as well.”

He also downplayed the impact of not knowing the circuits, saying “it should help” that he knows Suzuka for the next round, but that getting the car into the window where he’s comfortable is the main prerogative.

Given the confidence that Red Bull has had that Lawson is the right man to partner up with Verstappen, as he goes through the extreme worst-case scenario that must have been envisaged by the team’s management, it wouldn’t be surprising at all to see the Kiwi turn things around, and fast – justifying the reasoning behind his hiring in the first place.

What could help with that is moving to reduce the pressure on him, make it clear that he will be given the time to find his feet, and not have him get into his own head, fearful of suffering the same fate as what happened to Gasly and Albon in the past.

While, in an ideal world, Lawson’s status as an unproven rookie should afford him some patience to make progress, Red Bull’s position as a leading F1 team means they need him to start performing – and immediately.

Of course, if he toils away for these opening flyaway races qualifying and racing at the back with a car Verstappen is driving to podiums, then it’s time to act – might the start of the European season be in the back of Lawson’s mind when he suggests he “doesn’t have a lot of time”?

Lawson’s poor start means he’s in danger of spiraling further, and how he comes through this will largely come down to the support he feels – driving in desperation for a quick fix will only backfire, particularly if Tsunoda – the most obvious candidate to stand in – continues performing.

Perhaps stepping up to Red Bull was too much, too soon, for a driver who has only completed half a season across two years, and swapping Lawson and Tsunoda may yet end up being the correct path forward for all the parties involved – and allow Lawson to discover what it’s like being a fulltime F1 driver away from the pressures of being at the sharpest end with Red Bull.

On the flipside of that, Lawson was hired on the basis of his potential and his temperament. A single good result at this point would show the mental resilience Red Bull hired him for, and stave off some of the pressure that now envelops him.

As for Tsunoda, who must be watching this with some satisfaction, he qualified ninth for the Chinese Grand Prix and was asked whether he take up a seat with Red Bull if it was available, to which he replied, “Yeah, why not?”

Pressed on if he’d be up for it at the Japanese Grand Prix, his home race, in two weeks, Tsunoda said, “Japan? Yeah 100 percent, the car [Red Bull] is faster.”

It’s imperative Red Bull gives Lawson the time to find himself – not only for the sake of this year’s championship but for the very idea of succession and the future.

If he can’t do it, adding to the list of competent drivers who couldn’t, then that hints at a razor’s-edge design philosophy that will leave the team badly exposed the day Verstappen moves on.

Read Next: ‘Copy that, Lewis’ – Bono makes the Antonelli mistake we’ve all been waiting for