Red Bull team principal Christian Horner defended his new driver Liam Lawson after he was eliminated in the first round of qualifying on his debut for the team.
Lawson made a mistake on his final run in Q1 which cost him his chance to progress beyond the first round of qualifying. He lost time earlier in the day when a power unit problem prevented him running in final practice.“It was a tough day for him because losing [final practice] at a track that he’s never raced at – he’s the only driver on the grid not to have raced here – immediately put him on the back foot,” Horner told the official F1 channel.
“His first run was pretty decent, considering the lack of mileage, but then unfortunately a lock-up on the second run, a mistake on the third run, the pressure’s just building and building at that point. So you can’t judge him on today’s performance, but hopefully he can have a reasonable run tomorrow.”
Lawson was one second slower than his team mate Max Verstappen in Q1, the largest gap between any pair of team mates who completed laps.
“Max is a machine of a team mate to be next to,” said Horner. “You can’t judge Liam on what we’ve seen so far. It’d be very unfair to do that.
“He’s had a really difficult run so far. Let’s see about the race tomorrow, and then of course, as we get to tracks that he starts to know, I think he’ll start to come alive.”
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Horner praised the drivers from Red Bull’s second team, Racing Bulls, who both qualified ahead of Lawson. Yuki Tsunoda, whom Red Bull passed over for promotion to their team this year, took fifth on the grid.
“Yuki did a great job today and I have to commend Isack Hadjar as well,” said Horner. “I thought, of the rookies, he did an outstanding job. So it’s great for that team, great for Yuki to be to be right up there ahead of the Ferraris.”
However Horner said it was too soon to suggest Red Bull had promoted the wrong driver. “We’ve got a sample of one,” he said. “You have to remember how close Liam was to him. Isack Hadjar as well is doing a great job.
“Yuki, you can see that experience is playing through now. He’s an experienced grand prix driver, and he’s using it, he’s driving with his head, he’s doing a good job, and it’s good for him to be starting at the sharp end of the grid. It’s exactly what he needs to be doing to keep saying, ‘look I’m still here’.”
Lawson admitted he was unhappy with his performance. “We expected the start of quali to be tough, to be honest,” he told Sky afterwards. “The first laps were expected to be off and then we were just planning on building through the session.
“But obviously going off on that second lap sort of put everything out of order a bit. Then the last lap was good, honestly, just until the last sector where I just had a big drop.”
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Lawson said his problem in final practice “obviously doesn’t help any of this but I also shouldn’t be going off in quali.”
He said he was on course to make a significant improvement on his final lap but struggled with his tyres in the final sector.
“Before turn nine we were about half a second up,” he said. “And then obviously we would have just kept improving.
“But I already had a snap through nine and 10, I think the tyres were already starting to drop there. That’s something we’ve just been battling this weekend and obviously something that we missed practising in P3.”
However Lawson believes Red Bull have made progress with their car. “We feel like we made a step with the car today, regardless of this. Obviously Max is in a good position so we definitely made a step and obviously the weather tomorrow is variable so let’s see.”
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2025 Australian Grand Prix
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harsha vardhan
15th March 2025, 7:05
Horner thinking: here we go again
El Pollo Loco
15th March 2025, 11:59
lol, the same exact things we heard about Perez. I mean, he has to protect Liam even if their primary excuse for putting him there was his “mental strength and confidence,” but it does feel like Groundhog Day.
Petty spite toward Honda, Max preferring a weak teammate and RBR’s desperation to keep him happy all led to this place. While I’m not one of these people who revel in hating RBR, they’ve only got themselves to blame.
Formula1 (@s2g-unit)
15th March 2025, 17:12
Where is the proof that Max asked for a weaker team mate? Where do other people (not you) get the nonsense that RedBull only designs a car to suit Max?
Why can’t it be that Max is incredibly talented and is driving around whatever issues the car might have?
El Pollo Loco
15th March 2025, 21:23
Max publicly said it didn’t make sense for RBR to sign Alonso. IDK you, but that’s a pretty clear sign to RBR. The fact he constantly backed Checo, never said anything like I’d love to be teammates with Carlos again or negate the idea Sainz would be unwelcome, etc. is indicative of a similar fact. However, I don’t blame or single Max out for this. Besides Prost, all the GOATs have tried to keep away highly competitive drivers. This goes for Alonso, Hamilton, Sennna, Schumacher, Vettel (though I don’t consider Seb a GOAT), etc. Why would you want another strong driver in the team taking away focus from you or possibly taking points off you?
I also don’t agree with those who say that RBR only designs the car for Max. Newey designed a car intended to have the maximum available performance. Not the easiest car to drive. Will the team focus development around their best driver? Of course, but that goes for any team. And if another driver was good enough, they’d be able to drive the car just as fast.
I would say it’s less of Max driving around problems and more that he’s able to handle what allows the car to be fast, which takes rare talent even among F1 drivers.
Jere (@jerejj)
15th March 2025, 7:11
Early days, so everyone should avoid definitive conclusions based on single qualifying session or GP weekend.
Fer no.65 (@fer-no65)
15th March 2025, 7:27
Nah. Let the fun begin.
pcxmac (@pcxmac)
15th March 2025, 8:20
I doubt it. The same thing happened to Marc Marquez in MotoGP. This is about control of the team, tribal knowledge. Look what happened to Honda in GPs after he left, the bike turned out to be garbage for anyone else. Of course Marc had a small army behind him, a racing school, Repsol, etc… so it’s not hard to see how he pulled it off in Moto2 w/ Suter or GPs w. Honda.
Over specialization breeds death. Given where Tsunoda qualified, and the amount of rear wing Ferrari have, i would have to say that nothing has really changed between this and the end of last year.
Steve Rogers (@yossarian)
15th March 2025, 11:08
Absolutely too early and completely unjustified to speculate after one quali following Limited practice running. But it is fun, so…
Taking all bets! How many drivers will the red bull no2 car go through this year?! I’m going with 4. Lawson, Bortoleto, Iwasa, and finally Yuki.
Fer no.65 (@fer-no65)
15th March 2025, 7:27
I’ve seen this movie before.
Davethechicken
15th March 2025, 7:47
Yuki did well for the junior team.
But it was decided he would have been too fast to be a good number two.
Much better idea to give that drive to a rookie with zero experience of Melbourne.
Doggy
15th March 2025, 11:43
You do realize that in 2024 the average finishing for tsunoda is 12.5 vs Lawson 13.5…and this Lawson new and dropped in the car mid season
El Pollo Loco
15th March 2025, 12:07
This is silly, but I’m assuming this opinion is born of Max/RBR antipathy. No, the reason Yuki was rejected was 75% bitterness w/Honda and 25% they just never believed in him. However, Sainz and Alonso were passed over for being potentially too much competition.
They’d be in a much better place though if they had Yuki in the seat because, at the very least, they wouldn’t be wondering is he struggling because’s only run 9 races? and they could have always swapped Lawson in had been doing well in the RB. Now, their pride means Yuki can never be swapped (Marko himself promised Yuki would not be put in the RBR even if Max or Liam had to miss a race).
Davethechicken
15th March 2025, 13:21
No antipathy to Max, to Red Bull for their mollycoddling of him.
And silly? Well Yuki was faster in qualifying last years i Vcarb than Lawson was this year in the Red Bull. Definition of underperforming right there
El Pollo Loco
15th March 2025, 21:26
What I said was silly is the idea he’d be too fast for RBR. Do you genuinely believe their thought process was “Yuki will be too fast. They’ll end up tripping over each other.”? Come on.
As for YT vs LL, I’ve repeatedly said Yuki was faster and just all around a much better choice due to his much, much greater experience level.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
15th March 2025, 7:53
Let’s go with the excuses!
I’m gonna say it immediately: don’t lose time and swap tsunoda and lawson around, when you have drivers performing well below the car’s capability there’s not much to lose giving others a chance to perhaps do better, though tbh tsunoda would’ve made more sense from the start, since he was more experienced.
Davethechicken
15th March 2025, 7:56
With Yuki performing so well today there is literally zero chance he will get a promotion. It is quite a bizarre set up at Red Bull.
El Pollo Loco
15th March 2025, 12:10
This very sensible attitude/approach will not be taken because they put Liam in first and of all the noise they made about why Yuki wasn’t right. And, above all, them using Yuki as a really sad way of getting back at Honda.
ano
15th March 2025, 8:04
Horner hates Yuki who finished 6 places above Hadjar yet Horner immediately undersells Yuki’s performance and praises Hadjar.
The guy just looking for confirmation bias to tell himself he is right. Laughable.
kpcart
15th March 2025, 8:07
Too early to pile the pressure on Lawson, but another sad indication of why it is not worth being a no.2 driver in Red Bull, they always support the no.1 driver most, and they should as they pay that driver 20 times as much.
baasbas
15th March 2025, 10:41
@kpcart
Ah yes, that is why his start was bad. They don’t support him.
Thanks for confirming
anon
15th March 2025, 14:50
baasbas, Horner and Marko have both said in the past that their priority is on Max because the financial operating model of the team revolves around using his advertising value to drive commercial deals for the team.
To that end, they have said in the past that they give their second driver less support because they want to concentrate more of the resources of the team onto Max.
baasbas
15th March 2025, 18:32
@anon
That is easy to say. Priority, sure. You can be sure they’ll debut that new front wing on Verstappens car. It makes sense to prioritise him. But that doesn’t say they don’t (or insufficiently) support Lawson or any other driver next to Verstappen. They all have a team of performance coaches and engineers working with them.
The mental gymnastics on some of these threads are just weird. So they fired the mediocre (at best) driver but who brought in a lot of money for some new guy, that does not bring in a lot of money. And they don’t care how he performs. Sure. Then they would have kept the other guy, right.
Laz
15th March 2025, 8:10
Uh huh…
Bullfrog (@bullfrog)
15th March 2025, 10:16
Hopefully Suzuka will save his bacon – otherwise the next F1 track he knows is Zandvoort at the end of August… That’s way too long for Helmut!
Dale
15th March 2025, 11:30
😂 Markko’s C driver is far worse than the driver he had last year and couldn’t stop whining about … also worse than the other F1 2025 rookies, even though he has far more ‘experience’ than them.
Davethechicken
15th March 2025, 11:56
Lawsons Q1 time was slower than Perez Q1 time last year.
That is extraordinary.
Roger Ayles (@roger-ayles)
15th March 2025, 14:37
Is the fact he doesn’t know the track really a valid excuse anymore given how many rookies have turned up at Melbourne over the years & immediately looked like they had been racing around it for years. I mean Gabriel Bortoleto is also a rookie with less time in an F1 car than Lawson & he’s out-qualified his far more experienced team mate & Jack Doohan has been performing well over the weekend so far as well Isack Hadjar.
Lawson is totally new to F1 having driven what 11 races over the past 2 years so he should in theory be more prepared than others who have turned up here with it been literally there first F1 weekend.
I don’t mean to sound like i’m writing him off straight away or anything but let’s be honest here he took a car that should have been top 10 at worst & hasn’t looked like getting to up there all weekend & that isn’t all that impressive, Isn’t better that what Perez could have done & also is worse than what other rookies in less competitive cars have managed.
F180 (@f180)
15th March 2025, 15:11
Bring Alonso to Red Bull
El Pollo Loco
15th March 2025, 21:29
It’d have been the most box office pairing in history had they signed last Spring, but Horner didn’t have the balls.
MichaelN
15th March 2025, 22:44
Horner doing so much talking about Red Bull 2 that I doubt the average viewer even knows they have their own team principal. Big air quotes around that title, though. The guy can’t even choose his own drivers.
This two team setup shouldn’t exist. It was fun for a while in the late ’00s when F1 lost so many teams, but there hasn’t been a justification for it since 2010.