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Motorsport

Sport

What’s going wrong for Liam Lawson at Red Bull?

Liam Lawson Chinese Grand Prix Red Bull Max Verstappen Yuki Tsunoda Red Bull Racing Helmut Marko Isack Hadjar Pierre Gasly Racing Bulls

Red Bull is not a team in which to be struggling to unlock performance from a difficult car. Especially when your illustrious team-mate seems to be managing it.

Perception is everything in Formula 1, and the timesheets suggest Max Verstappen is making it look easy. Obviously the picture is different from trackside, where Max is patently deploying every ounce of his talent to keep the RB21 pointing in the right direction – but nuance such as this counts for nothing when a team’s drivers are at opposite ends of the grid.

The guy at the back will naturally end up carrying the can and be told to work harder. In the immortal words of Sir Patrick Head to Antonio Pizzonia on the Williams team radio in 2005: “Whatever it is that you do, do it better.”

This is the same driver of whom Manor team boss John Booth once remarked: “Handled properly, Pizzonia could have been a world champion.”

When Liam Lawson was promoted to be Verstappen’s team-mate rather than Yuki Tsunoda, Red Bull’s leadership cited Lawson’s mental strength as the deciding factor in making that choice. He’ll need that toughness after yet another wretched day at the office in China.

Lawson started at the back of the grid in the sprint after being eliminated in the first segment of the sprint qualifying session. Although he made progress initially, his forward momentum ceased when he reached the back of Isack Hadjar’s Racing Bulls car and he got no further than 14th – while Verstappen was third.

Later, in qualifying for the grand prix, he was left exposed by failing to set a fast enough first flying lap. He then had traffic in the form of Alpine’s Pierre Gasly on his last opportunity to set a quick lap.

Liam Lawson, Red Bull Racing (Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool)

“It was just one of those things – [Gasly] decided to go for his lap early and I started my lap too close,” Lawson told reporters afterwards.

“But it shouldn’t be the difference between me getting through to Q2 and not getting through, we should really be getting there on the first lap. It’s something I need to get on top of.”

Although he repeatedly says the RB21 has “a very small window”, Lawson insists the difficulty he’s having isn’t ‘tyre prep’ – the often tricky process of getting the sensitive Pirelli rubber up to the right operating temperature without asking too much of it – per se.

That’s not to say tyre management isn’t an issue at all: in sprint qualifying, when he was running mediums rather than softs, he put his failure to improve on his second run down to not cooling the same set of tyres down enough while staying out on track between runs.

But SQ1 is a much shorter session than Q1, so the run plan is very different – as is the amount of traffic at any given moment.

Lawson appears to be making a similar mistake to Verstappen's team-mates past – hustling the car too hard in the belief that’s what’s required, since Verstappen appears to be wringing its neck. This is particularly exposed at the Shanghai circuit, where over-committing on the entry to the first two corners – essentially one long turn of tightening radius – puts the front-left tyre under extreme duress.

If the car then washes out into understeer, as has happened to Lawson frequently during practice and qualifying, it can kill the lap outright. And the process of persuading the front end to bite again and getting on the gas can hurt the rear tyres.

“It’s just car characteristics, the way the car drives,” said Lawson. “Obviously if Max is able to drive it then I should be able to get on top of it as well.

Liam Lawson, Red Bull Racing (Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images)

“It’s just a very small window. It’s hard, you know – it’s hard to drive, to get it in that window. I’d like to say that with time that’ll come – I just don’t have time to do that, it’s something I need to get on top of.”

The question of time is a pertinent one, for two reasons. Unquestionably his relative lack of experience at this level puts him at a disadvantage, as have the technical issues which cost him a great deal of track time in the Bahrain test and ruled him out of FP3 in Australia.

In China, this being a sprint weekend, there was just one practice session. To his credit, Lawson hasn’t used this or his lack of prior racing experience on the circuits in Melbourne and Shanghai as an excuse: “It makes it harder but it shouldn’t be the difference between qualifying where I have,” he said.

The other factor making time pertinent is Red Bull’s institutional lack of patience with drivers who are failing to deliver the goods. When our colleagues put it to Red Bull’s Helmut Marko that Lawson acknowledged he needed time, but didn’t have time, Marko’s response was unequivocal: “He is right.”

Lawson has an unlikely ally in the form of his own team-mate, who agrees that the RB21 is difficult to drive and often not fast enough.

Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache said the engineering team had backed off its pursuit of pure performance to make the car more driveable this year; it appears to have succeeded in just one of those aims.

In a not highly encoded message to his own team, Verstappen highlighted to relative performance of the Racing Bulls junior team – for which Tsunoda qualified ninth and Hadjar seventh.

Liam Lawson, Red Bull Racing, Isack Hadjar, RB F1 Team (Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool)

"If you looked at Liam at Racing Bulls, actually he was quite similar to Yuki [on pace]," Verstappen told Dutch media after qualifying in Shanghai. “There was not a whole lot of difference between them, I thought.

"Otherwise, of course, the team wouldn't make that choice to put Liam in [to Red Bull]. And now suddenly that gap is very big and they are also very close to me. So of course that tells you something.

"If you would put Liam in the Racing Bulls, he will go quicker."