Red Bull exchanged teammates from Max Verstappen after just two season races. But Liam Lawson is only the last one who had no chance in the second cockpit of the success racing team. The list contains some known names.
99 days. Liam Lawson was only allowed to call himself “Red Bull Pilot” for 99 days before the Austrian racing team hastily pulled the emergency brake. After just two races in the new season of Formula 1, the New Zealander became a driver at the little daughter team Racing Bulls-from which he had only come before the start of the season-degraded, Yuki Tsunoda, in turn, was promoted to the new teammate of Max Verstappen at the “big” Red Bull. The almost unprecedented disassembly of the 23-year-old, no matter how unpaved on the very big stage, was thus completed.
“We have the duty to protect and promote Liam, and together we see that it makes sense to act quickly after such a difficult start,” said Red Bull team boss Christian Horner. At the Racing Bulls, on the other hand, Lawson can now gain further experience in “an environment and a team that he knows,” said the Brit, as a “protective measure”, which was nothing more than a “headless” reaction in which Lawson “was thrown away like a wet broken”, mostly explained in his analyzes so precisely Sky expert Ralf Schumacher: ” Find two races too little for a young driver.
And, more significant for the success racing stable: The same mistake happens to you again and again that the question can be asked, maybe even has to: do you not learn?
Lawson is only the latest victim: a failure at the start of the season in Australia, place twelve afterwards in Shanghai, and weak performance in the training and qualifying sessions – that was enough to quickly mature in team leadership that Lawson has not grown the demanding task as a teammate of the four -time world champion Max Verstappen. And Lawson himself? He probably never had a real chance to prove the opposite. Out after two races – that has a new dimension.
But with the quick decision, the success racing stable, which has been able to demonstrate the competition in the “premier class” regularly with Verstappen in the past few years, put itself in unrest very early in the 2025 season – even if you actually hope for the opposite at the headquarters in Fuschl am See. “I think Red Bull has to draw consequences from all the time,” said Schumacher at Sky recently – and also attacked the leaders: the team “does not really harmonize everything anymore. Christian Horner also seems to be wrong in his position.” Even more: “This is not a total failure, but it is not far from Dr. Helmut Marko (Red Bull consultant, editor’s note), who pushed Liam Lawson too in there.”
However, it is the most radical, but if not the first correction that the racing team has carried out in a decision – because the hoped -for congenial teammate for the ambitious, who is supposed to enter his fifth world championship in a row this year, has already proven to be incorrect.
Because in recent years some well-known Formula 1 drivers have failed in the cockpit next to the Dutch.