Lawson’s Bad Start Is a Symptom of Red Bull F1’s Problems, Not the Cause

Two-hundred-and-sixteen minutes in Australia and 206 in China: Liam Lawson has raced his RB21 a grand total of just seven hours in 2025. Even before the 23-year-old’s face could be etched onto an 8.4-ounce can of Red Bull, his Formula 1 seat is already up for grabs.

At Sunday’s Chinese Grand Prix, the New Zealander aimed to have a better race than his season debut in Melbourne last week where he failed to qualify past the first round and was one of six drivers to retire on race day. 

In Shanghai, conforming to the sharp contortions of the No. 30 Red Bull proved just as difficult. A Q1 exit in both qualifying sessions, a 14th-place Sprint finish, a pitlane start, and a points-less feature race result despite three disqualifications was bad enough. But then things took a turn for the worst: the media circus set in. Rumors of Racing Bull’s Yuki Tsunoda replacing Lawson as soon as the next race began swirling. Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said talk of a driver swap was “speculative” but that, while Lawson has clear potential, “we’re just not realizing that at the moment.” 

Coming second to Max Verstappen is F1’s least forgiving job. It’s the kind of dream gig most drivers’ yearn for: A seat at a championship-winning team known for doing whatever is necessary to end up on top; a seat at a team that places skill over age and isn’t shackled by legacy. 

But with that chaotic energy comes a cut-throat culture complete with a revolving door of drivers. 

First, it was a 23-year-old Pierre Gasly sliding into Daniel Ricciardo’s seat before returning to the team’s less-performative counterpart, Toro Rosso, in the mid-2019 season. Second, it was Alex Albon, who managed to cross the finish line in the top six in eight of nine races. As the performance gulf widened between Albon and the team’s resident prodigy, he was dropped the following season for a third driver: Sergio “Checo” Pérez. While Pérez lasted longer and matched Verstappen’s pace closer than most, his declining form across 2024 caused near-constant uncertainty about his future at the team. 

Now, Lawson is facing the same challenge as so many before him: wrangling the bull. 

Lawson’s two races for Red Bull this March may have placed him 17th in the driver standings, but his brief two stints stepping in mid-season have proved somewhat fruitful. He finished within the points in one of five races for AlphaTauri (now Racing Bulls) while replacing an injured Ricciardo in 2023 and collected four points in six races the following season. However, he was consistently out-qualified and out-performed by his teammate Tsunoda. 

It’s not necessarily the Kiwi, but rather the car at the core of the rotten can. 

It’s important to understand that Red Bull, like its razor-sharp brand identity, has a car that is hard to handle. While the knife’s-edge design favors Verstappen’s fast hands, it makes catching up to the team’s No. 1 driver near-impossible. Albon likened the car to playing a video game with the sensitivity settings turned up to the max. “You move that mouse, and it’s just darting across the screen everywhere, that’s how it feels. It becomes so sharp that it makes you a little bit tense,” the now-Williams driver said in a podcast interview. “It’s eye-wateringly sharp.”

Former Red Bull drivers have all bemoaned the car’s touchiness, made sharper at Verstappen’s request. But with the Dutch driver’s 30-second lead over the field in 2023, scrapping a design concept that positioned the team in clear championship contention was a suggestion easily brushed aside. In 2023 alone, Verstappen amassed over a third of his teammate’s total career points and, in 2024, he collected nearly three times as many points as Pérez. Red Bull won the World Constructors’ Championship two years in a row, but, in 2023, Verstappen’s 575 points were enough to win the constructors’ trophy without a teammate.

The energy drink giant that upset the paddock when it entered the sport in 2005 has broken a slew of records in the sport’s meticulously counted history book, thanks to Verstappen. But it has steered toward a tipping point since the beginning of 2024. With just as much upheaval off track—sexual misconduct allegations against Horner and a slew of personnel leaving, including the sport’s storied designer Adrian Newey—as on, it was difficult not to peer over Red Bull’s peak and anticipate a rapid descent.

Horner insisted over the race weekend that the team doesn’t build cars around one specific driver, but in the midst of the Dutch driver’s flailing form as McLaren ascended to win the first two races of the 2025 season, when does a well-performing second Red Bull seat become vital? And when does the team return to the drawing board to make that a reality?

Whether Tsunoda swaps his, often faster, Racing Bull for a navy blue car in dire need of a time machine back to 2023, it’s a reminder of how cruel the sport can be. Nothing is owed, and time—the margins that separate the good from the great—is borrowed.

For many Red Bull drivers slotting into that second seat, time is not on their side. “It’s just time,” Lawson said following Sunday’s Chinese Grand Prix. “Unfortunately, I don’t really have time.”

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