Liam Lawson has revealed that Red Bull took a gamble with his set-up at the Chinese Grand Prix, taking a performance hit with the intention of learning from the outcome and moving forward. Instead, the New Zealander was dropped from the team ahead of the following race in Japan. Lawson’s short-lived Red Bull stint was nothing short of a nightmare.
He was promoted ahead of Racing Bulls team-mate Yuki Tsunoda, but after crashing out at the Australian Grand Prix and spending the weekend in Shanghai driving around at the back of the field, he was dropped. Now, looking back, Lawson is unimpressed with the way his two race weekends were handled. “If you look at how other teams have approached bringing a young driver in and you look at the test days, the time in the seat, the amount of testing that, for example, Kimi [Antonelli] has done in the past before racing this year,” he told RacingNews365.
“We didn’t do any of that. It was two weekends on two tracks I’d never raced at, one of them being a sprint weekend. They weren’t smooth weekends. We had issues in Bahrain [testing] with reliability, we had issues in Melbourne with reliability.”
Lawson then focused on the Chinese GP weekend. In the sprint shootout, he was eliminated in P20, while team-mate Max Verstappen finished that session in second place, behind Lewis Hamilton at the top of the timing screens.
Then, after climbing to 14th for the sprint race, he was the slowest driver in the field once again in Grand Prix qualifying. This effectively ended his chances of scoring points, although he was promoted to 12th in the final classification after three drivers were disqualified.
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With the team already losing ground to rivals McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari, Red Bull’s senior leadership took the drastic decision to remove Lawson from the second seat and promote Tsunoda, who had started the campaign well with the newly rebranded Racing Bulls squad.
Looking back, Lawson doesn’t believe that the driver change was fair. “In China, we took a shot in the dark with the setup to try and learn something,” the 22-year-old continued.
“For me, I was under the understanding it was to help me develop for the future, to have an understanding of the car. So I was happy to drive with this sort of setup. That performance was then used to demote me from the team, basically.”
