How can Red Bull solve its Lawson problem? Our writers have their say

The 2025 Method 1 season isn’t even two rounds outdated and already Crimson Bull is going through the identical questions it contemplated for almost all of final season.

It has a peaky automotive that solely Max Verstappen can grasp, whereas new team-mate Liam Lawson is already feeling the burden of expectation that comes with being a Crimson Bull driver.

So, how does Crimson Bull resolve the scenario? Our writers provide their views.

Lawson wants time and help – Oleg Karpov

It was virtually all so predictable. Selling Liam Lawson to a senior workforce after simply 11 races in F1 would virtually inevitably imply he’d wrestle, given what the job comes with: an exceptionally good team-mate, the trickiest automotive to drive, and an unforgiving surroundings.

Lawson is superb underneath strain, and his responses to the media counsel he is nonetheless received the fitting strategy. Not making excuses and never panicking is strictly what he wants proper now. However even Sergio Perez, with a decade of F1 expertise underneath his belt, could not forestall a whole psychological breakdown ultimately.

However to interchange him now would repeat the identical mistake. Crimson Bull is legendary for trusting younger expertise – but additionally for burning it too quickly.

Why not strive a distinct strategy and again the brand new child in the identical means that Toto Wolff did with Andrea Kimi Antonelli? Supporting Lawson by way of this tough interval stands out as the solely proper reply.

Plainly Crimson Bull made a mistake by overlooking Yuki Tsunoda. It wasn’t a totally justified transfer – however the determination has been made. It is time to keep on with it.

Lawson’s admission that he “wants time”, however that he does not really feel he has that point, is a worrying signal. He is underneath sufficient strain as it’s, and the Crimson Bull bosses should do the whole lot they’ll to take it away from him. Sure, F1 is a performance-driven enterprise, however efficiency additionally comes from people who’re put in circumstances the place they’ll excel.

And selling Tsunoda mid-season would put strain on him as properly. To drive a brand new, difficult automotive and not using a pre-season take a look at, to be underneath the highlight of ‘OK, you needed this automotive, now present us what you are able to do’, would simply be mistaken. It dangers burning him too.

Lawson wants extra time. However greater than time, he wants help.

“Change your effing automotive” – Stuart Codling

The misattribution of a sure standard quote to Albert Einstein renders it no much less correct: “The definition of madness is repeating an unsuccessful plan of action time and again within the hope of acquiring a distinct outcome.”

This is only one quote that springs to thoughts – extra later – as Crimson Bull appears set on taking pictures the pianist but once more.

Liam Lawson’s troubled Chinese language Grand Prix weekend, within the wake of a equally ghastly few days in Melbourne, has led to the inevitable hypothesis about when he will probably be fired or demoted to Racing Bulls – with Yuki Tsunoda, over whom he was initially most well-liked, heading to the benighted storage subsequent door to Max Verstappen.

Crimson Bull has type on this division, having burned by way of juniors aplenty. Daniil Kvyat, Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon handed by way of in such fast succession that Dr Helmut Marko’s well-known young-driver programme discovered itself with a shortfall. Expertise was the proposed answer, and Sergio Perez duly met his Waterloo – but nonetheless the pipeline was stuttering, therefore Lawson turning into maybe not Mr Proper, however Mr You’ll Do For Now.

Liam Lawson, Crimson Bull Racing

Picture by: Mark Thompson

On the danger of stating the apparent, maybe the issue isn’t the particular person within the driving seat a lot because the fast-but-hideously-peaky confection of pricy alloys and carbon fibre that surrounds them.

It might be an costly path to take. And, for the reason that mission assertion of the RB21 was to commerce off some peak efficiency with the intention to make the height simpler to succeed in, maybe the workforce doesn’t know the right way to get there.

Moderately than keep it up repeating a failed plan of action, the time has come to strive one thing completely different. In Christian Horner’s personal phrases (to Toto Wolff, in a workforce principals’ convention captured in Drive to Survive Season 5): “You’ve received an issue – change your fucking automotive.”

You’ve made your mattress, now lie in it – Mark Mann-Bryans

To considerably torture an idiom, Crimson Bull has made its automotive, now they’ve to search out somebody to drive in it.

The difficulty is, there isn’t any one else aside from Max Verstappen who can wrangle the very best out of a machine that’s now not the choose of the sphere or the envy of the pitlane.

The RB21, like a number of iterations earlier than it, has been designed from its very core to ship for Verstappen – and Verstappen solely.

Now Crimson Bull has to personal that reality. Guidelines stipulate every workforce should have two automobiles and two drivers, in any other case Christian Horner would in all probability save money and time by operating Verstappen as a solo operation.

Max Verstappen, Crimson Bull Racing

Picture by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Pictures

The workforce will churn by way of promising rookie after promising rookie (and Sergio Perez) in its quest to search out anybody who can maintain a candle to Verstappen – a troublesome sufficient problem when all issues are equal, not to mention when they’re so weighted in favour of a four-time world champion.

Final season Verstappen claimed the newest of his quartet of drivers’ crowns whereas Perez floundered and finally sank within the uneven Crimson Bull waters. Liam Lawson seems as if he already wants a rubber ring to remain afloat, however it’s not his difficulty alone, as changing him with Yuki Tsunoda, Isack Hadjar or Arvid Lindblad would see the identical scenario unfold.

So simply settle for that the entire eggs are within the Verstappen basket as an alternative of asking different drivers to play rooster with their F1 careers by being pitted in opposition to some of the formidable automotive/driver pairings within the historical past of the sequence.