Liam Lawson has endured a dismal start to his Red Bull career after struggling in the opening two rounds of his first season with the team; Sky Sports News understands Red Bull are considering replacing him with Yuki Tsunoda for next month’s Japanese Grand PrixLawson has endured a dismal start to his Red Bull career, being knocked out at the first stage of all three qualifying sessions (including one in the Sprint format) and also exhibiting a lack of race pace, highlighted by the relative success of his team-mate Max Verstappen.
Red Bull chose to promote Lawson from their junior squad Racing Bulls after just 11 grand prix appearances in two short spells across 2023 and 2024, favouring the 23-year-old over his more experienced former team-mate Yuki Tsunoda.When asked about it in his own press briefing a couple of hours after Sunday’s race in China, Red Bull team principal Horner notably opted not to dismiss the report as false.
Horner said: “There’s always going to be speculation in the paddock. As I say, we’ve only just finished the race here. We’ll take away the info and have a good look at it.”Asked about Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko’s claims that a meeting had been scheduled for next week to discuss the situation, Horner said “nothing specific” had been set up.Following Lawson’s poor qualifying display on Saturday, in which he struggled to get his tyres into their operating window, Red Bull changed the set-up of his car, breaching parc ferme rules and condemning him to a pit-lane start.
“I think Liam’s had a tough couple of races, a tough weekend here. We elected to take him off the grid out of parc ferme to do a significant set-up change and so we’ve managed to get 56 laps of reasonable data from that,” said Horner.
“Obviously, we’ll take that away, we’ll have a good look at it, and, as a group, we’ll do our best to support him.
“Liam is obviously confidence-wise struggling with the car at the moment, which is why we made some significant changes to see if we could find a more confidence-inspiring set-up for him.”
