Red Bull have performed another of their stunning mid-season driver changes – and this week’s was perhaps their most brutal yet.
Pierre Gasly was shown the door 12 races into his first year with the team. Daniil Kvyat was turfed out four grands prix into his second season to make way for Max Verstappen.
But they enjoyed long tenures compared to Liam Lawson. He has been demoted to Red Bull’s second team after just a pair of appearances for the team. It’s the soonest any team has dispensed with a new driver at the start of a season for more than three decades.
It’s hard not to take the sudden switch as a sign the team has realised it made a mistake when it picked Lawson at the end of last season. But does that make it right to drop him so soon?
For
Lawson never got anywhere near the pace of his team mate Max Verstappen. He was over a second off the pace in Australia and still three-quarters of a second away in China. No other driver was that far behind his team mate.
The pace wasn’t there in the races either. He was far from the only rookie to hit trouble in Melbourne but he was nowhere near Verstappen’s pace up to that point either. In China he tried a radical change in set-up, to no avail.
Last year Red Bull lost the constructors’ championship because they failed to replace Sergio Perez when he was clearly under-performing. The decision on Lawson is tough but Red Bull couldn’t risk a repeat of last season.
Against
Red Bull never gave Lawson an adequate opportunity to show what he is capable of and have dropped him too soon. Both his starts came on tracks he had never previously driven at in any category.
Technical problems meant he completed fewer laps than any driver in testing besides the unwell Lance Stroll. More problems prevented him from driving in final practice in Australia.
His performance in China showed a slight improvement in one-lap pace, but as this was a sprint race weekend he was again short of practice time. Aside from a spin on slick tyres in the rain he has largely avoided incidents and did not deserve to be ousted so hastily.
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I say
It’s hard to take issue with Red Bull’s decision to replace Lawson based on his performance alone. He did not look up to the job.
But that only underlines what a strange decision it was to give him the seat in the first place. Red Bull’s reasoning was that he had virtually matched Tsunoda’s pace despite having less experience, which is fine up to a point, but that lack of running was always going to count against him when it came to getting used to an unfamiliar car.
I’m sceptical about the team’s claims that Tsunoda has made a leap forward in performance since the end of last year. He’s shown flashes of pace in qualifying, but that is in part down to the quality (and drive-ability) of his car. His mistake in Shanghai allowed his less experienced team mate to out-qualify him.
Tsunoda was probably the right choice in the first place, though that remains to be seen, and it’s hardly fair on Lawson to write him off so quickly. So I tend to disagree that Red Bull have done the right thing with this call – though I hope for Tsunoda’s sake his debut on home ground goes well.
You say
Is Red Bull right to replace Lawson with Tsunoda at this point in the season? Cast your vote below and have your say in the comments.
Do you agree Red Bull have done the right thing by replacing Liam Lawson with Yuki Tsunoda after two rounds?
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