“Not super fun so far” – either a pithy scrawled note penned by the late Roger Ebert part-way through a tepid, multi-million dollar blockbuster (Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, perhaps?) or Liam Lawson’s assessment of his opening four races in 2025. As we’re not Empire Magazine, you know it’s probably the latter point.
This was supposed to be Lawson’s big break. Parachuted into the second Red Bull car when Sergio Perez was let go by the team, the Kiwi was selected upon his traits of adaptability, pragmatism, and hard-headedness when faced with far more experienced racers on the grid.
On his first race back in F1 last year at Austin, he didn’t once kowtow to Fernando Alonso. Nor did he play a subservient role to Perez in Mexico during their own track spar – something he was publicly admonished for by Red Bull’s higher-ups. But one can surmise that, secretly, they probably really enjoyed it – in the same way that some like to watch nature documentaries to see a 300lb cat savage a wounded impala.
As was commented at the time, this was despite most of the conceivable metrics laying in Yuki Tsunoda’s favour when considering which driver to promote. Tsunoda had more points in their head-to-heads, stronger qualifying results, more experience, and a tangible glide path of progress over his previous four years in the championship. For all of the data-crunching that goes on in F1, Red Bull’s driver management stable does seem to be held together with the adhesive power of ‘just vibes’; in this instance, the feeling that if Lawson can be reasonably close to Tsunoda off the bat, then he’s surely got potential to rise to a higher level.
Then came testing; all indications are that Red Bull realised relatively swiftly that it had made a bit of a blunder. No slight on Lawson here – okay, maybe a little bit – but it was almost as if throwing a driver with only 11 races worth of experience into a car notoriously difficult to handle could be viewed as jumping the gun.
Liam Lawson, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool
Lawson could throw his weight around in 2023’s AlphaTauri and last year’s RB, as they were (by the time he’d got his hands on them) benign-handling cars. On both long- and short-run pace across the Bahrain test, Lawson clocked in some way off from Verstappen, and that abyssal deficit seeped virulently into the season. The New Zealander had, to Red Bull’s dismay, kowtowed – to the whims of the car he was expected to grab by the scruff of the neck.
The switch with Tsunoda was supposed to do one of two things: one, help Lawson rebuild, and two, give Red Bull a driver who had been defiantly impressive in the opening two races. Had Racing Bulls’ strategies been a little more up to scratch, Tsunoda would have racked up a string of results in the middle reaches of the top 10 – he was running fifth in Australia before the rain shower came, and in a net seventh in China before his team decided a second stop was worth doing despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Although Christian Horner was known to have more reservations than a Michelin-starred restaurant about Tsunoda’s worth, even he couldn’t fight the tide any longer. As of Bahrain, Tsunoda is now off the mark with Red Bull – in race where the team suffered with degradation and with a circuit that did not play to the RB21’s strengths.
But this all leaves Lawson in a very precarious place. That Tsunoda has been able to jump in and get a tune out of a difficult car suggested that the decision to swap drivers has been (so far, at least) vindicated, while Lawson has dropped into an easier car and is yet to score.
Japan can be chalked off as a learning round. Lawson indeed outqualified Tsunoda but was mugged by his ex-team-mate early into the race. As for Bahrain, Lawson was understandably defensive about his inability to break out of Q1, stating that “an issue with DRS” had cost him his progression. Although vague, it’s technically true – but his explanation omits an important part of that. Technical chief Tim Goss explained that Lawson had to lift on the exit of Turn 10, with the throttle travel being enough to trigger the DRS to switch off. If Goss’ explanation tallies, then it very much seems like a driver probably trying too hard into a corner that usually rewards a passive exit.
Lawson’s race also suggested that he’s overdoing it. In his effort to recover, he picked up two penalties for contact with other drivers – Lance Stroll and Nico Hulkenberg – nothing that “I felt the only way I could overtake was having a launch from quite far back”. That’s certainly the F1 equivalent of throwing certain non-Newtonian substances at a wall to see what sticks, or rather, throwing a host of 20-somethings into a Red Bull to see what works…
Liam Lawson, Racing Bulls
Photo by: Bryn Lennon – Getty Images
The whole point of Lawson’s demotion was for him to rediscover his mojo free of pressure and allow him to ease back into a more familiar atmosphere. Instead, there appears to be a sense of desperation to expedite the process, and to demonstrate his qualities in what he considers a timelier manner.
And, so far, that’s been to Racing Bulls’ cost; you can’t help but wonder how Tsunoda would have got on in Lawson’s stead. Despite Lawson’s under-the-cosh assertions that he’s beaten Tsunoda across their time in junior racing together, a retrospectively ill-advised statement before his demotion, he’s not really proving to anyone that he’s the better driver. (Either way, Lawson’s assertion holds little water when you consider that Tsunoda, driving for F3’s backmarker team Jenzer in 2019, was wildly impressive that year – and was arguably the defining reason why the Japanese racer leapfrogged him in the pecking order.)
What does Lawson need? In this moment, probably a week off – but as the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix is next up, he doesn’t have that luxury. Either way, he needs a psychological disruption: something that shocks the system and inhibits his internal monologue of tail-chasing through a grand prix weekend. Maybe start Saudi off with a set-up that’s overwhelmingly off-base and feels like trying to drive a supermarket trolley through a cobblestone street – then switch him back to his usual baseline. A ruse does tend to work in situations like this.
