Okay, I’m cutting right to the chase. After the Chinese GP and the hot rumour fresh off the press about Helmut Marko calling an emergency meeting, I asked for questions for my end-of-month, “Ask Dre” post, and well, there was a theme… Red Bull and the Liam Lawson pickle, especially with rumours strong that he’s about to be swapped back to Racing Bulls. So let’s try and write enough words to answer your questions in regards to the biggest talking point to come out of the weekend:
“Do you think Red Bull has a second driver problem or a car design problem?” – Peter Mac
I said it in my DRR post after China, and I’ll repeat it here: I’ve been saying for some time that it’s the latter. The body of evidence is pretty strong. On one end of the garage, Max Verstappen. One of the greatest of all time with four consecutive titles, and you can make a fair argument that he didn’t have the best car in two of them (2021 and 2024).
Previous teammate Alex Albon described the Dutchman’s driving style as “Playing Call of Duty with the sensitivity turned up to 10”, with a liking for making his cars extremely front-biased. It’s unconventional, and when you combine that with his ability to extract so much performance from his car, you HAVE to favour him because he’s your only shot of a title. The field was always going to converge, and when that day came in 2024, they got gobbled up because they’ve been an unbalanced team for over half a decade.
And as I said on Sunday, Gasly, Perez, and Albon have all proven their worth in F1, outside of the Red Bull setup. Gasly won a GP for the junior team and was a talisman for Team Faenza. Checo’s the best midfielder of the modern age. He was so good in 2020, he forced Red Bull to break their policy to only hire from within for the first time since Mark Webber. And Alex Albon has kicked ass at Williams for over two years. That says to me, you have a baseline car that only one man can drive. It means I can’t answer your question definitively because why would an elite driver join Red Bull right now, and likely be another victim?
I know it’s the “of the moment” topic, but what on earth do Red Bull do now? – Max
Do what they probably should have done in December – And put Yuki Tsunoda in the Red Bull seat. Canal+ in France broke the story first, backed up by Van Haren at De Telegraaf, and when it’s VH on a Red Bull story, it’s probably kosher. Remember, he broke the story on Christian Horner’s misconduct allegations this time last year. Everyone else is now tiptoeing around the story, waiting for the seemingly inevitable announcement.
I don’t completely hate this move. If you’re going to rip the band-aid off, you’re probably better off doing it early, as it’s the next best thing compared to giving Tsunoda a full off-season, as long as you’re assuring Yuki he has the whole season no matter what. If you believe that Tsunoda’s the better option now, you might as well give yourself more spins at the slot machine.
But it begs the obvious questions – Why wasn’t Yuki your top option in the first place? What was the threshold in your eyes at Red Bull for Lawson to be considered good enough to keep? 8th? 10th? 12th, like where he finished in China? I don’t have the data that they have, but what about the last four months has led them to this path of decision-making? Pierre Gasly was considered a colossal bust at Red Bull, and even he had 12 races in blue before being given the cane around the neck. To deem someone not good enough in two is an utter disaster for everyone involved, and its yet more humiliation for Red Bull management, who have won despite repeated bouts of incompetence at the top.
Any other team and Christian Horner and Helmut Marko would have been fired for gross incompetence.
If you were Yuki, would you rather be in the RBR 2nd seat next in 2026 or angle for a seat with Cadillac? – Mike Fisher
The fact that this is even a question, given it’s Red Bull, an elite team on paper, and Cadillac, fresh off the press as another Ferrari customer, says it all. This is a horrible situation for Yuki as well. It feels like he’s playing Russian Roulette here.
If this works out, he can secure a long-term future with Red Bull and finally get that top seat he thinks he’s been good enough for for the last 18 months. If this doesn’t work out, he’s likely done in F1 altogether. Remember, Yuki has huge Honda backing, but their last affiliation with Red Bull is gone at the end of the year with a Ford sticker being placed on their new Powertrains division. Red Bull will likely push Isack Hadjar along as “next man up”, with Arvid Lindblad joining the queue depending on his time in F2, older machinery and their simulators.
Aston Martin could save him, but that would mean either a shock Fernando Alonso retirement (His contract runs through 2026) or dropping Lance Stroll. Both seem unlikely. And does Yuki have enough experience to angle for Cadillac at all? Colton Herta seems nailed on for one of the Cadillac seats, but who gets the other? Yuki would be my favourite, but maybe a driver with more seasoning, like Valtteri Bottas or Sergio Perez, could be viable as a driver with more experience to help guide a new team. Checo would be ideal for that role, and his Mexican draw power would be a bonus prize.
Once again, paraphrasing the great Rory Breaker: “You’re going to have to work very hard to stay alive here, Yuki.”
Put yourself in Helmut Markos’ position (Ew, I know), how would you deal with the Liam Lawson problem? And what would you have done differently regarding RBR and them burning through drivers? – Gearhead97
Short-term answer – I’d have promoted Yuki Tsunoda at the end of 2023 on a one-year “prove it” deal. I read the tea leaves around Japan that season when Checo ploughed into the side of Kevin Magnussen at the hairpin. The tragic thing about Perez is that while he wasn’t ever truly great at Red Bull, at least his first two years in the team were passable (And he earned a lot of internal goodwill for his 2021 Abu Dhabi support). He dropped off quickly in the middle of Max’s otherworldly 2023, and I thought, Why wait for another year?
One of the biggest mistakes Red Bull made with Checo was giving him contract extensions early and it seemingly made him complacent rather than motivated to improve. Twice. Cut bait now and promote Yuki Tsunoda, give him a full offseason into 2024 and give him the best possible chance to succeed off the back of some good form. If it doesn’t work out, you still have Lawson, Hadjar and Ricciardo in a straight shootout for 25’ as potential options.
Longer term, I’d have gone back to 2018 and asked Daniel Ricciardo: “What’s it going to take for you to stay? Equal standing in development? Matching Renault’s gargantuan 2019 offer of £18m a year? If there was truly no swaying him then fair enough – I’d never want to hold a driver against their will. But given Horner openly admitted at the time Ricciardo didn’t want to be a #2, and was seemingly okay with it, it makes me think he didn’t try as hard as he could have, and thought Gasly would be just fine for 2019.
Simply put, I’d ditch the internal hires-only strategy. Go best driver available and see if it truly was a case of bad driver vs bad car, and eliminate what the issues were. Gasly clearly wasn’t ready down the road, and Albon was mediocre at best. Maybe give Checo that phone call two years before Racing Point shoves him out?
Maybe Nico Hulkenberg finally gets the factory deal he’s always deserved? A more experienced, versatile pair of hands might have been the ticket, but we’ll never truly know. I’d also likely have tried to keep Carlos Sainz on the books… You know, just in case he proves himself at multiple top teams or something. Isn’t hindsight wonderful?
But I need to stress, this is me trying to put a plaster over a gunshot wound. Red Bull’s issue isn’t the driving talent, it’s the fact they’ve boxed themselves in with Verstappen. And you can’t afford to let him go, so this is the way they have to be.
You could even go further and say since their very inception in 2006, they’ve been janky with driver management – dating back to Vinantonio Liuzzi, Christian Klien and Robert Doornbos, or in their later years, Jaime Alguersauri, Sebastien Buemi and Jean-Eric Vergne. They’ve always treated anyone who isn’t their Number 1 driver as an expendable part of the system, and it’s come back to bite them time and again.
This is who they are. Dear Turkey, you’ve just voted for Christmas. In March.
Now here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to split my inbox in two, and handle the NON-Lawson-related questions for the weekend, as this felt important enough to have as a standalone piece while still tackling everybody else’s questions later. Two for the price of one, rather than one heap of 4,000 words. Got it? Good! Check back on Friday for the rest of Ask Dre!
