Red Bull's Helmut Marko has admitted handing Liam Lawson an early promotion to Red Bull in Formula 1 over Yuki Tsunoda was a mistake.
On Thursday morning Red Bull announced Lawson and Tsunoda would swap places, with the Japanese driver promoted to the main team while the Kiwi would return to Racing Bulls with immediate effect.
Lawson paid the price for two disappointing weekends in Melbourne and Shanghai in which he struggled to get a tune out of Red Bull's 2025 car, the RB21 which team-mate Max Verstappen has also labelled difficult to drive. Lawson crashed out in the rain in Australia after qualifying in 18th, and was last on the grid in China before moving up to 15th, which became 12th at the finish after three disqualifications.
But rather than handing the New Zealander more time to acclimatise, Red Bull's leadership felt it needed to act swiftly to change its fortunes and see if the more experienced Tsunoda could get better results, with the Japanese driver making his Red Bull debut on home soil in Suzuka next week.
Speaking before the decision was officially announced, driver advisor Marko said Lawson couldn't recover from his difficult Australia outing, and admitted promoting the 23-year-old early was not the right thing to do.
"Yuki was too inconsistent," Marko told oe24 about Red Bull's call to initially pick Lawson for 2025. "That's why we unanimously decided in favour of Lawson. But he wasn't able to perform under the greater pressure, right from the first day in Australia.
"Then he went into a downward spiral. It's like a battered boxer, it's very difficult to get out of it. From that point of view, it was a mistake [to put Lawson in the Red Bull].
"In Australia, he had a turbo failure in the third practice session, losing mileage as a result. But of course, what he has done so far has not been enough. We need a strong second driver, if only for the team strategy."
Marko admitted the new Red Bull is more difficult to handle than the Racing Bulls machine, with the outfit flat out to find solutions to its balance problems. World champion Verstappen travelled to the Milton Keynes factory on Wednesday for a deep dive into the RB21's issues with the team's technical staff.
"That meeting was primarily about Max sitting down with the engineers and going through the next step," Marko explained. "The aim is to calmly address Max's wishes and criticism. It's true that the RB21 is difficult to drive. The Racing Bulls is easier to handle and very fast on a qualifying lap. But in the race it is clearly behind the Red Bull car."
But while Marko felt Verstappen's fourth place in Shanghai was 'worse than it looked', he admitted the team still has a lot of work ahead to get on par with the dominant McLaren.
"Things have improved, but our result was worse than our performance," the 81-year-old Austrian added. "Max was too cautious with the medium tyres, and with the hards he was able to keep up with the McLaren anyway.
"Our car has to work better than that [to fight for the championship]. It won't happen overnight."
