Red Bull’s Lawson pick makes its Ricciardo experiment a waste of time

Let’s recap the saga of Red Bull’s second seat alongside Max Verstappen, shall we? It’s a saga that, by all accounts, is gratuitously long and ends in a resolution that would be entirely predictable for a team with a ‘normal’ approach to the driver market.

Carlos Sainz became unexpectedly available for 2025 when his Ferrari seat went to Lewis Hamilton. The Verstappens did not want Sainz in the Red Bull team, lest the unpleasantness from the time they were Toro Rosso team-mates resurface. In the early season, Perez was doing his job as number two, and so Christian Horner decided to extend his contract early to stave off any potential losses in form as he’d experienced in 2023.

That didn’t work, and instead Perez’s regression was even more cataclysmic. Red Bull had brought Daniel Ricciardo back to F1 to serve as a potential plug-in-and-play replacement if Perez dropped off again, but Ricciardo’s own form was poor and was beaten comprehensively by Yuki Tsunoda in their time as team-mates.

Perez’s form continued to drop, to the point where Red Bull thought about replacements ahead of the summer break. Liam Lawson was invited to test the Red Bull, with rumours that he hadn’t quite found the pace that was being looked for. As such, Perez was retained for the rest of 2024, but continued to be awful everywhere except Baku. Ricciardo was dropped after Singapore, and Lawson took the seat. Tsunoda beat the Kiwi semi-rookie in points scored and in qualifying, but Horner doesn’t really like him. As such, the choice was this: retain Perez and the god-knows-how-many millions he brings in Mexican sponsorship, effectively rendering him a pay-driver, or show Perez the exit door and bring Lawson in. The latter option was selected.

Whether or not you agree with the choice of Lawson to join Red Bull, there are very clear qualities that he offers to his new employers: consistency, toughness on track, and strong race pace. If the car’s good, he’ll win races if the conditions are right, but he’s there to ultimately back up Verstappen’s title defence in 2025. The measure of success will simply be shrinking the gap that Verstappen and Perez had towards the end of their time together.

But Red Bull’s decision to hire Lawson raises a significant question: if he’s now good enough to move up to the senior team, why was he not considered good enough for a seat at RB a year ago?

When AlphaTauri forecast its decision to rebrand to RB and named its drivers for 2024, it did so at a time when Ricciardo was out with a hand fracture, sustained in his Zandvoort FP2 crash. It also did so at a time when Lawson stepped into the AlphaTauri and looked good value for money, particularly after impressing with ninth at the Singapore Grand Prix. Lawson, in his five-race stint for the Italian squad, had looked more ‘on it’ than Ricciardo did from the get-go. It wasn’t entirely surprising that Ricciardo and Tsunoda were named as RB’s line-up for 2024, but there were many who felt that Lawson deserved a full season.

Thus, choosing Lawson paints “the Ricciardo experiment” in an even more curious light: namely, what was the point? The team effectively wasted a year trying to rekindle an old flame, purely based on the idea that he was the only driver to really match Verstappen regularly in their time as team-mates. The theory was that, if Red Bull could get Ricciardo back onto his pre-McLaren peak, it could supplant Perez and no longer have to deal with his form fluctuating wildly throughout the season.

In a highly technical sport, Red Bull seemed to base its decision to employ Ricciardo purely on goodwill, its vision of the rear-view mirror tinted in a garish rose hue. In truth, Ricciardo was probably done with F1 – or at least needed the entirety of 2023 to recalibrate, rather than the six months he actually took away. Being dumped into the AlphaTauri in 2023’s Hungarian Grand Prix with no testing at Nyck de Vries’ expense essentially threw him back into a situation he’d escaped with McLaren: discomfort, unfamiliarity, and without adequate preparation.

He did what he could, of course. Ricciardo is a grin-and-bear-it type of chap when it comes to difficult circumstances, but this wasn’t the ideal preparation. Perhaps the allure of a Red Bull F1 return was too great, but the tantalising carrot at the end of the stick always looked too far out of reach.

Those considered not good enough are readily kicked to the curb, unless a driver has a back catalogue of good drives. This earned both Ricciardo and Perez credit

Under the auspices of Red Bull, Ricciardo had driven the RB19 in a 2023 Silverstone test as part of his third driver role at the team. The claim was that the eight-time grand prix winner had done a lap good enough for the front row of that year’s grand prix, a notion played out in an episode of Drive to Survive to sensationalise the emerging story. Is Red Bull, a championship-winning F1 team, completely beholden to superstition – so much so that it would wilfully ignore the differences in track conditions and tyres? Maybe it really wanted rid of de Vries; maybe it really believed that it could ‘rehabilitate’ Ricciardo.

Here’s where Red Bull’s own vision of the past created a camera obscura effect. It is completely true that, in 2016 and 2017, Ricciardo was the better driver; Verstappen was still very young, and prone to sprinkling the odd high-pressure mistake in between accomplished drives and daring overtakes. By 2018, Verstappen was top dog. The narrative at the time was that Ricciardo was suffering more than his fair share of reliability issues but, in truth, Verstappen led the qualifying head-to-head 15-6 and as the season moved on, began to find an ever-increasing advantage over his more experienced team-mate.

Ricciardo was utterly brilliant in China, and his Monaco win was a feel-good redemption story after Red Bull’s own pitlane blunders had cost him the year before. But those were his last two truly great drives. His decision to move to Renault for 2019 was not received at all favourably by Red Bull but, in the cold light of the stopwatch’s faintly glowing LCD screen, he was continuing to drift away from Verstappen.

It exposes a greater duality of Red Bull’s driver management structure. Those considered not good enough are readily kicked to the kerb, unless a driver has a back catalogue of good drives. This earned both Ricciardo and Perez credit, and thus the team lingered far too long on both drivers in an attempt to rediscover a vein of performance that had long since faded.

Blind faith on results of years gone by rather than looking to the future exposed problems in Red Bull’s driver management structure

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

On two occasions, the well had run dry, but Christian Horner and Helmut Marko both stared at it in the blind hope that the water would appear once again. For a team famously unsentimental, sentiment has got the better of it – and it’s missed out in the driver market because it simply cannot look beyond itself.

Lawson might be the right driver for the team, he might not – only his performances will dictate that. The team might have been better off casting aside its prejudices and promoting Tsunoda but, just as it dwelled too long on Ricciardo and Perez, it gave the Japanese driver short shrift in equal measure.

Either way, its earlier experiment with Ricciardo now looks like time wasted – in attempting to save the Australian’s F1 career, it has fully killed it off. And that’s also had the adverse effect of giving it less to look over in comparing Tsunoda and Lawson. As such, Lawson has a big task ahead of him to get on terms with Verstappen – and he’ll be hoping that the lack of comparative seat time in 2024 won’t hurt his preparations too much.

Red Bull won’t mind because, whatever happens, it has Max Verstappen. But there will be one day when it doesn’t – and if the driver pipeline continues to be marred by indecision and inertia, the team will have masterminded its own problems in formulating a succession plan.

What will Red Bull do when Verstappen calls time on his career?

Photo by: Lubomir Asenov / Motorsport Images