After two years of trying to fight his way onto the Formula 1 grid, Liam Lawson didn’t have the start to life he would have wanted at Red Bull Racing.
Liam Lawson had to prove himself in two separate auditions with AlphaTauri and RB – now Racing Bulls – before Red Bull decided to offer him a full-time race seat.
The Australian Grand Prix turned out to be one of the toughest tests each full-time F1 rookie could have faced with a scorching qualifying followed by downpours during the race.
Lawson was the only driver who had never raced at Albert Park before and had a disastrous Saturday, missing out on FP3 and then going out in Q1 in qualifying.
The race wasn’t much better for Lawson as he spent the majority of his time running near the back of the field while his teammate Max Verstappen challenged both McLaren drivers for victory.
The New Zealander then crashed out during the final downpour on the same lap as Gabriel Bortoleto, bringing a tough first race weekend with the team to an unfortunate close.
Mark Webber summed up Lawson’s race weekend in Australia like he was trying to climb Mount Everest without an oxygen mask, confirming how difficult his task looked from the outside.
Sky Sports reporter Ted Kravitz was speaking about Lawson’s performance on Ted’s Notebook and made a case for why the 23-year-old isn’t necessarily to blame.
He discovered that Red Bull made a change to Lawson’s car that had a detrimental impact on his performance.
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Ted Kravitz explains why Liam Lawson was ‘very, very slow’ during the Australian Grand Prix
Reflecting on Lawson’s weekend, Kravitz explained: “This car is not particularly quick, the Red Bull. I mean, it’s quick enough for P2 obviously and to be P3 on the grid, but you look at Liam Lawson’s problems today and you can understand how Red Bull would really take and how Max said, I’ll take a P2 while they try and figure it out.
“Liam Lawson was a DNF, all of the rookies apart from Kimi Antonelli [and Oliver Bearma] crashed today.
“But Liam started from the pit lane with more downforce, a higher downforce rear wing and a new beam wing to try and stay out of trouble in the wet and all that did was make the car very, very slow.
“He made no impact with too much wing on the car, Liam Lawson, absolutely no impact and then spun and crashed in the same place as his Red Bull stablemate Isack Hadjar.
“So, a very poor showing all round that Liam Lawson, [it was] probably not his fault because they seemingly had too much wing on the car thinking it was the right thing to do, but it was not.”
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Liam Lawson laments ‘pretty terrible’ Australian Grand Prix performance
Lawson is the latest driver to face what appears to be the impossible task of being Verstappen’s teammate.
Sergio Perez was far more experienced than Lawson when he was signed by Red Bull for the 2021 season but after just two years his performances had dropped to a concerning level.
Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon can provide plenty of notes on what Lawson shouldn’t do, but it looks increasingly like Red Bull are simply developing their cars to suit Verstappen’s unique driving style and hoping whichever driver is placed alongside him can adapt.
After the race, Lawson said in his press conference: “This whole weekend was pretty terrible. Today we were too slow at the start and then we gambled.
“It nearly worked, but it wasn’t to be. Starting from the pitlane was tough and we just didn’t really have the speed in the first stint on the inter.
“We struggled with the fronts too much, so we will analyse and look at that in detail before the next race.”
Albon already warned Lawson that his first race with Red Bull would be tough but it’s unlikely he anticipated just how difficult he would find it racing around the streets of Melbourne.
