If Formula One’s mercurial Dr. Helmut Marko is to be believed, Liam Lawson is already the walking dead. The 82 year old Austrian’s pet media outlet, F1-insider, has reported that Lawson will be sacked by Red Bull following a big pow wow in Milton Keynes this week.

The problem though for Red Bull runs deeper than who is Max’s team mate and the rights and wrong’s of dismissing Lawson are highly complex. There have been historical accusations that Red Bull Racing build their Formula One cars to suit Max’s driving style and that his team mate’s can’t cope with the skittish behaviour of the resulting designs.

But in all probability this is not the case as both Christian Horner and ex-Red Bull tech guru Adrian Newey have insisted in times past, they design the faster car and the drivers have to learn how to handle them best.

 

 

 

RB21 exceptionally “tricky” to drive

In fact most of the drivers on the grid have accepted their driving styles have been significantly affected since the 2022 introduction of ground effect F1 car design. Lewis Hamilton is the perfect example. His fall from grace was spectacular and coincided with the introduction of ground effect car designs. Hamilton has just two Grand Prix victories to his name in the three years (70 Grand Prix) since the ground effect cars were introduced.

Simply put, the ground effect F1 cars were introduced to produce around 50% of the downforce from under the floor. Removing some of the upper body aerodynamics was intended to allow the cars to follow more closely without being impacted by the dirty air from the car in front. And even in their first F1 incarnations between 1978-1982 this kind of car design was way less stable once the underfloor was used to suck the car down onto the track.

The F1 cars now break away from the drivers’ control in a less predictable fashion than before ground effect, and even the mighty McLaren team’s MCL39 for 2025 is more difficult to drive than its predecessor according to Lando Norris. So to suggest Red Bull are doing anything substantial differently from the rest of the field is nonsense.

Red Bull’s issue is that their number one driver is the best in a generation and while he can master the foibles of the Milton Keynes technical department’s designs, but his team mate’s cannot. Whilst the cars are not being designed for Max, it appears the Red Bull cars from 2024/25 are hugely difficult to master and more so than for the other drivers and teams.

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Red Bull failed to prepare Lawson

The mastery required for driving the latest F1 offering from Red Bull was evident in China as Verstappen battled through and Lawson was hunting for a needle in the proverbial F1 driving handbook haystack. Verstappen enters the slower corners hunting for the grip before he starts to rotate the car properly. Lawson by contrast is driving by numbers. His inputs into the steering wheel are more pronounced than his team mate, with him often finding himself mid corner having overshot the ideal line by braking too late.

Red Bull only have themselves to blame and not in terms of car design, but their preparation of Sergio Perez’s replacement. The farcical nature of the final third of last season and the ever present debate over Perez’s future appeared to cloud the judgement of those in Milan Keynes and fail to make proper preparations.

Whilst Lewis Hamilton was serving out his time at Mercedes last year, the F1 team were quietly developing their replacement protege by sending him testing in a two year old Mercedes AMG F1 car. Kimi Antonelli amassed some 10,000km of track time in 2024 and whilst the car he was familiarising himself with was different from the current car in competition, there are characteristics which remain the same, which is why Antonelli looks at home with his W16.

Meanwhile Red Bull were consumed with the issue of Daniel Ricciardo. Having brought him in as backup for Perez, his results were not stacking up and so they dropped him with six weekends of the 2024 season to go, promoting Lawson to the VCARB racing seat.

Lawson attacks Tsunoda

 

 

 

Blaming Lawson sends a message to Max

Would it have been better had Red Bull left Ricciardo in situe to the end of the year and sent Lawson out testing each week as Mercedes were doing with Antonelli? We can never know, but its no coincidence one driver looks ready for his F1 experience and the other is like a lost child.

Yuki Tsunoda tested the 2024 Red Bull car at the post season Pirelli sessions in Abu Dhabi. He claimed he cold feel the improved performance over his VCARB car and that the RB20 “suited my driving style” rather than complaining the car was skittish. To give Yuki the test rather than Lawson appears to be another strange decision from Red Bull given their collective mind was already leaning towards Lawson to replace Perez.

Yet the rules for the post season test meant either Lawson or Tsunoda were allowed to take part in the test, and Red Bull picked the driver they had no intention of placing alongside Verstappen this year.

The implications of sacking Liam Lawson are huge for Christian Horner and far more reaching than his desire to bring back Ricciardo to the sister team. The impact on Max Verstappen of anything Red Bull currently decide is massive, given he appears to be the only driver in the world capable of keeping Red Bull’s F1 car designs competitive.

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Verstappen unusually defends his team mate

Verstappen went out of his way to defend Lawson in China, something he never did for team mate Sergio Perez at the height of his woes. “If you look at the difference between the two drivers at the other teams, they are all closer together,” Max told De Telegraaf. 

“It also shows that our car is extremely tricky. I think when you put Liam in the Racing Bulls’ car, he goes faster. I really think so. That car is easier to drive than ours. I also notice that when I talk to Liam. Last year, I didn’t think the difference between him and Yuki Tsunoda was that big. Otherwise the team wouldn’t make the choice to put him in at Red Bull either.”

The stability and unpredictability of the RB21 was addressed by team boss Christian Horner in China, who charted the development of the car to the assembled media. “If I think back to the beginning of ’22, we had quite a stable car with quite a bit of understeer in it, which obviously Max hates. But we had an upgrade in Spain where we put a lot more front into the car and Max made a big step forward, Checo [Sergio Perez] sort of nosedived from that point.

“You’ve got to produce the quickest car and you’re driven by the information that you have and the data that you have,” Horner said.

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Admitting its Tsunoda will be embarrassing

Whilst Max Verstappen has no loyalty to his team mates, Red Bull sacking another this week as F1-insider has suggested will happen is not going to impress their star driver. He has been complaining for some time about the fact the Red Bull car is too slow and “tricky” to handle so a scape goat sacking is unlikely to cut the mustard as far as Max is concerned.

Probably Yuki would cope better with the RB21 given his comments from the Abu Dhabi post season 2024 test, but the optics of promoting him to Red Bull are the exact opposite of Red Bull’s intention when recruiting Liam Lawson ahead of the Japanese driver.

Honda are leaving the Red Bull Racing stable and Tsunoda is Honda’s man which is why he didn’t get the Red Bull drive for 2025. Replacing Lawson with Yuki is an admission of a gross error from the management in Milton Keynes but it seems if Lawson is to be demoted tot he Racing Bull’s, Horner and Marko have little choice.

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Honda now key to scrapping 2026 engines

Whilst the on track action kept Formula One fans nailed to their seats as Lewis Hamilton and Oscar Piastri were victorious at the 2025 Chinese GP, a remarkable back story was developing which could shake the sport to its foundations.

The FIA indicated it had opened discussions over scrapping the controversial new F1 power units due to race next season. It appears that the push to create a hybrid powertrain which delivers 50% electrical power and 50% from the internal combustion engine was a manufacturers pipe dream and now the chickens are coming home to roost.

Upping the electrical output by a factor of three appeared to be the silver bullet to engage global automakers, something the FIA has been hoping to achieve for more than a decade. When Red Bull was filing for divorce with their Renault engine supplier and Honda were contracted exclusively to McLaren, for a short while the possibility of a top F1 team having no power unit was a realistic proposition the FIA had to deal with with…. READ MORE