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INSIDER: Where did it all go wrong for Red Bull?
Red Bull’s dumping of Liam Lawson raises an awkward question for the team: where did it all go wrong?
There’s a lot happening in Formula 1 at the moment. Oscar Piastri has a very real chance of a world championship this year, there’s Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari (and THAT double disqualification in China), and Jack Doohan’s plight at Alpine in the face of Franco Colapinto. They all deserve to be spoken and written about, and in time will be, but the big story right now is the house of cards that is Red Bull.
On the face of it, swapping Lawson for Yuki Tsunoda is a pragmatic change; the Kiwi was struggling, and his inexperience exacerbated the issue, so swap him out and hope for better things. We can be critical of that decision, and we should be, but on balance Lawson probably got the better end of the stick – we’ll find out in Japan.
However, it’s a band-aid solution that addresses the symptoms and not the cause of the problem. This issue is a systemic failing of Red Bull’s driver development program over a prolonged period.
Red Bull put itself in a position where it did not have a clear and ready replacement for Sergio Perez. The Mexican’s performances nosedived last year, and he was ignominiously turfed from the team, with Lawson slotted in as his replacement after just 11 races in F1. It can absolutely be argued that he was set up to fail.
Putting the second driver dilemma aside for a moment, a key issue in all of this is Max Verstappen. No matter what you may think of him, the Dutchman is an exceptional talent and will be remembered among the absolute greats of Formula 1 (we can debate on exactly where on the list he appears over a beer or two). His formative years were in and around the F1 paddock; motorsport has been in his blood his entire life, and he possesses innate talent which, when coupled with his early experiences, allows him to do things in a car nobody else can. And therein lies the problem.
F1 designers are incentivised to chase performance, and Verstappen has traditionally offered positive reinforcement of that given he’s gone faster and faster with each upgrade. But as he’s gone faster, his teammate has begun to struggle. Alex Albon experienced it, Sergio Perez experienced it. It’s not that Red Bull designs a car for Verstappen; it’s simply that the team delivers performance that Verstappen is able to capitalise on which sends designers down paths that ultimately lead to a car only Verstappen is able to maximise. It’s won Red Bull world championships, so we can’t argue with its effectiveness.
The flipside of that is it makes the second Red Bull driver’s task increasingly difficult and that leads to a degree of impatience from the squad’s management. It tried to be more patient with Perez and it got burned. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say, and there was no hesitation with Lawson as a result. And it’s understandable; Max is delivering, so the car can be driven quickly and get results, so it must be a problem with the other bloke and not the car. It's a logical deduction but one that doesn’t account for the fact Verstappen is a generational talent.
But let’s wind it back a little further. Perez joined Red Bull in 2021 after the squad deemed neither Pierre Gasly nor Alex Albon were up to the task. Perez was the first driver in many years to join Red Bull having not been through its junior program. He was a solid driver, a race winner in fact, but was a journeyman rather than the next Sebastian Vettel. He was a stopgap in the absence of a better option.
And that’s the issue. In the years that followed Verstappen joining the F1 grid, the Red Bull driver program that was once so proficient in terms of promoting (and dumping) drivers had slowed down. That coincided with Red Bull becoming increasingly competitive towards the end of the last regulatory era which meant there was more pressure on the second driver. Gasly and Albon both had their chances and, rightly or not, where deemed unsuitable.
Gasly entered F1 mid-year in place of Daniil Kvyat at the same time as Carlos Sainz joined Renault in 2017. That saw him race alongside Brendon Hartley at Toro Rosso (as Racing Bulls was then known), whose own career ended midway through 2019 when Kvyat returned, joining Albon (again at Toro Rosso), Gasly having been promoted alongside Verstappen at the main team.
The latter stages of Daniil Kvyat’s F1 career underscores perfectly the fact the Red Bull conveyor belt had stopped. Helmut Marko, Red Bull’s motorsport advisor, is not especially brilliant at picking the next great talent, but he realises it’s a numbers game – the more young drivers he promotes, the greater the chance of finding a Vettel or Ricciardo or Verstappen; bona fide race winners and potential world champions. Yet in the mid-2010s, that process slowed.
For 2020, AlphaTauri (as Toro Rosso became known) fielded two Red Bull rejects: Kvyat and Gasly. The following year, rather than making wholesale changes, Yuki Tsunoda was drafted in to replace Kvyat, who bowed out of F1. The Gasly-Tsunoda partnership then remained for 2021; the system was clearly broken at that point as Horner and Marko looked to Perez – who was unemployed at the end of 2020 – to fill the second seat. The Red Bull junior program had failed.
But worse, there was an opportunity to fix it. In 2023, Liam Lawson was ready to graduate to Formula 1, but instead of believing in its own talent, Marko again went external and hired Nyck de Vries for the AlphaTauri drive. The Belgian was part of McLaren’s young driver program but was dropped after 2019. He finally found his way onto the F1 grid with a cameo in place of Alex Albon at the 2022 Italian Grand Prix, scoring points to put himself in the spotlight. It was a performance strong enough to convince Marko, who overlooked Lawson in what, in retrospect, was a missed opportunity to kick-start Red Bull’s flagging junior program. When de Vries failed to fire after 10 races, he was replaced by Daniel Ricciardo. Again, it was an opportunity to reignite the junior program, but the decision was instead made to throw a lifeline to a driver who was, as difficult as it is to admit, already passed it. It wasn’t the move of the Red Bull program of a decade earlier, the one that discovered and promoted youth rapidly, unearthing race winners along the way.
Sure, there were casualties, but the team always had an option. It had trust and faith in itself and offered its young drivers the chance to gain experience.
That all came undone with Gasly and Albon and is an underlying issue that has not been addressed. As a result, the squad has arguably ended up with a weaker second driver than it might have otherwise had, and in turn, the team has been steered down a development path almost tailoring the car to Verstappen. And that leads us to today, where Red Bull has a fast but niche car and a lack of depth from which to draw.
There is light at the end of the tunnel. Arvid Lindblad looks like a bright young talent and will be eligible for a Super Licence in a few months. Isack Hadjar is showing well enough too. The wheels are turning once again within the Red Bull driver program, but it will take time to move beyond the situation the team currently finds itself in. Meanwhile, Tsunoda finds himself in the hot seat as Lawson looks to rebuild his career just as Gasly once did.