It’s been over three decades since a Formula 1 team dropped a driver as hastily as Red Bull got rid of Liam Lawson.
Red Bull has shown their new signing the door just two rounds into the championship. The last driver this happened to was Ivan Capelli back in 1993.Capelli had been hired by Jordan to be their experienced hand alongside rookie Rubens Barrichello. On the face of it, he was a potentially smart signing, whose previous team was Ferrari, no less.
They hired Capelli after he came close to winning races in Adrian Newey’s superb Marches. But the 1992 Ferrari was a woeful machine and the team dropped Capelli before the year was over. Question marks therefore hung over his pace.
Jordan was heading into its third season, with its third different engine supplier, and reliability was a persistent problem throughout testing up until it arrived in Kyalami for the season-opener. There more technical trouble cost Capelli practice time, a situation not helped by the FIA suddenly halving the length of practice sessions to 45 minutes.
Capelli qualified 18th, four places behind his inexperienced team mate. Two laps into the race, he spun and demolished the right-rear of his car – a costly error on a day when only five drivers were circulating at the chequered flag.
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If that was bad, it was nothing compared to the disaster which followed at Interlagos. March had withdrawn from the championship, confirming no more than 26 cars would enter each race. Originally, 24 of those were allowed to start, but the teams agreed unanimously to expand the grid to 25, meaning only one driver would not qualify.
Capelli’s failure to qualify, while Barrichello lapped over two seconds faster and claimed 14th on the grid, spelled the end of his time at Jordan and the end of his F1 career. Jordan replaced him with another experienced driver, Thierry Boutsen, for the following round. He, too, failed to see out the season. By the time the year was over, Jordan had run six different drivers.
Others have come and gone from seats in two races or fewer since then, but Capelli remains the last case of a driver being dropped so soon after the start of a season. The likes of Ricardo Zonta (BAR, 1999) and Juan Pablo Montoya (McLaren, 2005) missed the third round due to injury. Others like Jos Verstappen (Benetton, 1994), Mark Blundell (McLaren, 1995), Antonio Giovinazzi (Sauber, 2017) and Nico Hulkenberg (Aston Martin, 2022) started the first two races as substitutes.
Some of F1’s smaller teams have chopped and changed drivers during a season more quickly since then. These were typically one-off substitutes due to injuries or bans. However some drivers were handed one-off appearances, such as Karun Chandhok’s final start at Lotus in 2011 or Andre Lotterer’s single F1 start at Caterham three years later.
The only other driver whose situation was comparable to that of Capelli and Lawson in the intervening period was Luca Badoer during his brief stint at Ferrari in 2009. He was appointed as a substitute for the injured Felipe Massa, and had the opportunity to complete the season for the team, but was dropped due to his under-performance after two races.
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The team’s choice of Badoer was a surprising one as a decade had passed since their long-serving test driver’s last F1 race start, with Minardi. In his two-race stint for the Scuderia, he proved disastrously uncompetitive.
On his debut for the team at Valencia, Badoer was almost one-and-a-half seconds slower than the next-slowest driver in Q1. He missed the cut for Q2 by two seconds and was two-and-a-half seconds off team mate Kimi Raikkonen. To put that into perspective, in Q1 at Melbourne this year Lawson was 18th ahead of the two Haas drivers, half a second off reaching Q2 and a second slower than his team mate, Max Verstappen.
That proved Badoer’s final start: His place was taken by Giancarlo Fisichella, who finished second to Raikkonen at Spa. Lawson can at least console himself with the knowledge that he is still an F1 driver, and has the chance to redeem himself back at his former team after his Red Bull dream fell apart so quickly.
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Nulla Pax (@nullapax)
27th March 2025, 14:33
Something occurred to me earlier.
What is Liam like as a team member?
I really don’t know much about him. Is he good at giving feedback etc? Does he get involved with the technicalities of the car in order to better understand it?
I may well be miles off here – but what if Liam is simply saying that the car is rubbish and expecting the engineers to fix it?
Dropping a good driver so quickly seems to indicate more going on behind the scenes IMO.
No matter how much you may dislike Red Bull you have to admit that they are a top team with top quality employees.
If it is obvious that Liam can’t/wont help then yes – they would drop him fast.
As I said – this is pure blue-skying from me, and I’m most likely suffering from too much red wine.
I really want both Liam and Yuki to do well now. Wouldn’t it be great to see these two fighting for something like tenth place at Suzuka? ;)
Craig
27th March 2025, 14:44
He’s been part of the Red Bull Junior program a long time, they’ll know how he operates.
An Sionnach
27th March 2025, 16:57
I don’t think we want to read too much into it. It seemed Liam was not able to drive the car at all. I would have liked to see him at Suzuka at the very least. Too bad that happens to be Yuki’s home race.
Since they can swap the drivers without firing anyone, they should just try them all as they’re not allowed to do any testing. If Yuki and Hadjar can’t manage it, they should open it up to anyone else. Make it into a rodeo. Roll up, roll up! Anyone fancy their chances on F1’s bucking bronco? Mick Schumacher? Drugovich? Bottas? Magnussen? Zak Brown?!?
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
29th March 2025, 5:34
Indeed, I’d like to see everyone being given a chance: mick schumacher was treated unfairly by steiner, who, look at the case, is no longer in f1, and I believe would be a decent midfield driver (obviously red bull would be a bit much for him), drugovich never got a chance at all and for all I read he deserves one, bottas was unfairly dropped by sauber, since he not only was deserving of a seat in f1 but performed better than any non-top driver recently in his stint at mercedes (better than even 2021 perez), and he could be a decent number 2 at red bull, and magnussen why not, he never really impressed me but never got a chance at a top team, nothing to lose.
SteveP
30th March 2025, 10:53
You’re forgetting: Maximum of 4 drivers per team per year…
bosyber (@bosyber)
27th March 2025, 18:36
One additional bit of context about Badoer which is interesting in the context of comparing with the Red Bull situation is that Fisichella, who in the Jordan had shown pace, points and podium, was in fact quite far, some would say embarrassingly far, behind Raikkonen, and it was pretty likely the car was a handful to drive but Kimi had experience, and well, he remained the same talent he was when he started I guess; a bit like Verstappen then?
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
29th March 2025, 5:36
Yes, that’s true, I remember fisichella’s ferrari stint being disappointing compared to what he showed earlier on in his career, even that same year at force india.
Jere (@jerejj)
27th March 2025, 18:51
Oh, that famous & unforgettable ”My grandmother is faster than Luca with a Ferrari” banner & I wonder whether the person in question still has that banner after all these years.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
29th March 2025, 5:38
Ahah, I didn’t remember that, but I remember him being incredibly slow, rightfully dropped.