Red Bull’s current driver travails can be traced back to a critical weekend almost three years ago, which changed the path of Liam Lawson’s trajectory.

Red Bull is starting all over again in its quest to find a suitable teammate for Max Verstappen, with Liam Lawson demoted back to Racing Bulls after just two race weekends as Yuki Tsunoda has been promoted to the senior team – meaning answers as to whether the bigger issue is driver or car will soon be answered.

How did Red Bull end up in its current predicament?

The issue of finding a teammate who can provide consistent and capable support for Max Verstappen, all while contributing points to the team’s tally, isn’t one that you’d imagine a top-level Formula 1 team with a well-stocked junior programme would have.

But that’s exactly the scenario Red Bull has found itself in for more than half a decade now, with junior drivers like Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon, and now Liam Lawson all arriving and struggling – it’s worth remembering that Gasly, as far back as 2019, went through the same confidence-sapping process that Lawson has gone through over the past few weeks.

But while Gasly was forced to persevere and slumped ever harder into a deep well of disillusion, Red Bull spotted the warning signs that Lawson was starting to spiral in the same way and moved quickly to get him out of that situation.

“It has been difficult to see Liam struggle with the RB21 at the first two races, and as a result, we have collectively taken the decision to make an early switch,” team boss Christian Horner said.

“We came into the 2025 season with two ambitions, to retain the World Drivers’ Championship and to reclaim the World Constructors’ title, and this is a purely sporting decision.

“We acknowledge there is a lot of work to be done with the RB21, and Yuki’s experience will prove highly beneficial in helping to develop the current car.”

It’s a somewhat embarrassing situation for both sides to have ended up in – for Lawson, whose star has dimmed a little as his prospects shift away from potential race wins and podiums to mere career survival and the heady heights of the upper midfield, as well as Red Bull, who have been forced to all but acknowledge an error in judgement in promoting a driver with just 11 ‘part-time’ Grand Prix starts behind him into a seat alongside Verstappen.

“We have a duty of care to protect and develop Liam,” team boss Christian Horner said, “and together, we see that after such a difficult start, it makes sense to act quickly so Liam can gain experience, as he continues his F1 career with Racing Bulls, an environment and a team he knows very well.”

Taking a chance on rookies isn’t something top teams do very often, with Red Bull taking less of a gamble with Lawson than, say, Mercedes as the Brackley-based squad promoted complete newcomer Kimi Antonelli to succeed Lewis Hamilton in their W16.

But, while Antonelli appears to be thriving, Lawson struggled to impress Red Bull from the moment he climbed into the RB21 in Bahrain testing, with his primary discomfort being with low-speed corner entry.

Given the much-discussed unique handling characteristics of the RB21, a car that already seems to be easier to operate compared to last year’s troublesome RB20, the theory behind this could be a simple one – lack of preparation time.

In a sport that has highly-prescribed testing rules limiting the running of current machinery, Lawson is right in his assessment that he simply doesn’t have the time to adjust – his only training comes during points-paying Grand Prix weekends.

While Lawson was plumbing away in the Racing Bulls car last year, the VCARB01 was an altogether less edgy machine – a car that, at the heart of its DNA, is a more forgiving design by way of being more prone to understeer and easier to push to the limit than the front-end sensitivity of the Red Bull.

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What could Red Bull have done differently with Liam Lawson pre-F1?

Given the knowledge of these traits, Red Bull thus could have employed a TPC (Testing of Previous Cars) programme for Lawson, similar to what Mercedes carried out at numerous tracks throughout 2024 with Antonelli.

Contrast that with Mercedes fielding Antonelli for an extensive programme, letting him loose on a range of different circuits to get a feel for the DNA and handling characteristics of their car designs – giving him a better feel for what to expect in the W16, than if he’d carried out testing with a Mercedes customer team, for example, Williams.

While Antonelli wasn’t confirmed as being a race driver for F1 2025 as Mercedes played a waiting game to see if they could tempt Max Verstappen or another known top quantity to their team, Mercedes prepared on the basis of it being a done deal – giving Antonelli time at the likes of the Red Bull Ring, Imola, Silverstone, and Barcelona.

Meanwhile, Lawson wasn’t able to carry out Red Bull’s young driver testing requirements last season, due to his experience with Racing Bulls already pushing him past the threshold of the regulations, although did manage to get behind the wheel of the RB20 for a filming day at Silverstone – a ‘test’ in which he set off no alarm bells, but also didn’t appear to stun in a way that jumped him clearly ahead of Daniel Ricciardo in Red Bull’s hierarchy.

Lawon’s preparation for Formula 1 thus was never ideal. In 2022, with the then-AlphaTauri squad on the lookout for a replacement for the departing Pierre Gasly, Lawson’s availability and third place in Formula 2 weren’t enough to convince Red Bull to place him in the F1 sister team.

Instead, Red Bull was distracted by external names. Colton Herta, an IndyCar star, briefly became a target for signing, only for the FIA to shut down that chance due to him not meeting the requirements for a Super Licence. After that, the one-off outing for Nyck de Vries for Williams at Monza was enough to have Helmut Marko scrambling for his signature – a signing that Christian Horner had strong reservations about.

With De Vries proving a damp squib through the first half of 2023, a misjudgment that Marko would later describe as his “biggest mistake”, Red Bull needed an injection of fresh talent coming up behind the reasonably stable combination of Verstappen and Sergio Perez.

However, once again, Lawson wasn’t the option taken, despite being the reserve driver for both teams – instead, Red Bull opted to put Daniel Ricciardo in the car and leave Lawson in Super Formula, where he fought all the way for the title and eventually finished as runner-up.

This was despite Lawson actually getting his chance to debut in place of the injured Ricciardo, impressing during his substitution run as he claimed points in the Singapore Grand Prix.

But it took until the inescapable conclusion that Perez and Ricciardo were past their best before Lawson was given his chance, with no indication that Red Bull was willing to move heaven and earth to get him into a car – but the possibility of losing him to a rival team, like Audi, was a realistic one as a contract option deadline last September applied some pressure on Red Bull.

But, while Antonelli was putting in the hard yards making use of every bit of track time Mercedes was making available through its TPC programme, the fact Perez was on a long-term contract meant that the same preparation time was not afforded to Lawson – the hope against hope was that Perez would rebound and the reality of replacing the Mexican didn’t become apparent until the end of the season, when it was too late to get Lawson onto a full preparation programme.

But this does ask some questions of Red Bull’s junior driver programme and why the last two years have been spent trying out alternatives from outside that programme rather than promoting Lawson in the first place. If the Kiwi had been given the seat instead of De Vries, he would have two years of experience behind him, and everyone would have been much better informed as to the potential and possibilities available.

Instead, Red Bull tried to make it work with a driver they didn’t need to go near in the first place, before circling back to deny Lawson a place further by carrying out the Ricciardo experiment – a somewhat understandable gamble, given the potential upsides, but again keeping Lawson on tenterhooks and reducing his chance to get some much-needed experience.

Now, having called time on the experiments, Lawson is under-prepared and not fully equipped to jump into the situation asked of him – not helped by Red Bull attempting to fast-track the process by skipping over Yuki Tsunoda entirely in their bid to place Lawson where they wanted him to be.

Added to this is the additional pressure Lawson will now be feeling as Isack Hadjar has reached Formula 1, and the very promising and highly-rated Arvid Lindblad isn’t far away from getting his Super Licence. With Lawson being two years behind where he could have been, the rush from both sides to get to where they could and probably should have been has now stung both sides.

To Red Bull’s credit, the situation has been recognised as a mistake – and quickly. Spotting that Lawson was in danger of spiralling, he’s been pulled back into a lower-pressure scenario, and the swapping of Tsunoda and Lawson places them where, by rights, they probably should have been in the first place.

“Yuki was too inconsistent, and that is why we unanimously chose Lawson, but under the increased pressure, he couldn’t deliver from day one,” Helmut Marko told Austria’s OE24.

“He entered a downward spiral, it is like a stricken boxer and on top of that, it is hard to get out of it. In that sense, it was a mistake.”

The indications of the Lawson camp are that the decision to revert to Racing Bulls is one that the young Kiwi is on board with and that Red Bull has acted in Lawson’s best interests in an attempt to protect him and allow him to find his feet in a cooler setting.

As one source told PlanetF1.com, Lawson has the chance to rebuild as a “star in a reasonably priced car”, and this is a scenario Lawson is comfortable with.

For Tsunoda, he now has the chance he’s been looking for for a long time – and there’s no real downside for Red Bull either. If he succeeds, the problem is solved – there doesn’t appear to be many beating down the door to secure Tsunoda’s services, and this proves that the issue lies more at the feet of the drivers being able to adjust than the car itself.

If he fails, then it allows Red Bull to call time on its association with Tsunoda and frees up a seat to shuffle their younger drivers – Lawson, Hadjar, and Lindblad – around as needed.

Of course, if yet another driver, this time a known quantity as a strong performer, flops, then that signals the problem, primarily, is with the car, not the drivers, and thus may force Red Bull into a rethink for its future design philosophies and, finally, make life a little easier for any Red Bull driver whose name isn’t Max Verstappen.

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