Red Bull’s choice of Lawson makes the Ricciardo experiment a waste of time

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

Carlos Sainz unexpectedly became available for 2025 when his Ferrari seat went to Lewis Hamilton. The Verstappens did not want Sainz in the Red Bull team so that the unpleasantness from the time when they were teammates at Toro Rosso would not resurface. At the start of the season, Perez was fulfilling his job as number two, and so Christian Horner decided to extend his contract early to avert possible losses in form like in 2023.

That didn’t work, and instead Perez’s regression was even more disastrous. Red Bull had brought Daniel Ricciardo back into Formula 1 to serve as a potential plug-in-and-play replacement should Perez fail again, but Ricciardo’s own form was poor and was highlighted by Yuki Tsunoda during their time as team-mates beaten.

Perez’s form continued to deteriorate, to the point where Red Bull were considering a replacement before the summer break. Liam Lawson was invited to test the Red Bull, although there were rumors that he hadn’t quite found the pace that was hoped for. Therefore, Perez was retained for the remainder of 2024 but continued to perform horribly everywhere except Baku. Ricciardo was dropped to Singapore and Lawson took the place. Tsunoda beat the New Zealand semi-rookie in both points scored and qualifying, but Horner doesn’t really like him. So the choice was between Perez and the God knows how many millions he would bring in as a Mexican sponsorship, making him a wage earner, or show Perez the exit and get Lawson. The latter option was chosen.

Regardless of whether you agree with Lawson’s choice of Red Bull or not, there are very clear qualities he offers his new employers: consistency, toughness on the track and strong racing pace. If the car is good, he will win races when the conditions are right, but he is there to ultimately support Verstappen’s title defense in 2025. The measure of success will simply be narrowing the gap that Verstappen and Perez had towards the end of their time together.

But Red Bull’s decision to hire Lawson raises an important question: If he is good enough to make the senior team now, why wasn’t he considered good enough for a place at RB a year ago?

When AlphaTauri predicted its decision to rename itself RB and named its drivers for 2024, it did so at a time when Ricciardo was sidelined with a broken hand he sustained in his FP2 crash at Zandvoort. This also came at a time when Lawson stepped into the AlphaTauri and offered good value for money, particularly after impressing with ninth place at the Singapore Grand Prix. Lawson had seemed more “in form” than Ricciardo from the start in his five races for the Italian team. It wasn’t entirely surprising that Ricciardo and Tsunoda were named in the RB squad for 2024, but many felt Lawson deserved a full season.

Many felt it was unfortunate that Lawson was not included in RB’s initial driver lineup for 2024

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

So Lawson’s choice presents “the Ricciardo experiment” in an even stranger light: namely, what was the point? The team essentially wasted a year trying to rekindle an old flame based solely on the idea that he was the only driver who could really take on Verstappen on a regular basis during his time as a teammate. The theory was that if Red Bull could get Ricciardo back to his peak ahead of McLaren, they could oust Perez and no longer have to deal with his wildly fluctuating form over the course of the season.

In a highly technical sport, Red Bull appeared to base its decision to hire Ricciardo purely on goodwill, as his rearview mirror vision was tinted a bright shade of pink. In truth, Ricciardo was probably done with Formula 1 – or at least needed all of 2023 to recalibrate, rather than the six months he actually took away. When he was thrown into the AlphaTauri at the 2023 Hungarian Grand Prix without testing at the expense of Nyck de Vries, he essentially threw himself back into a situation he had escaped with McLaren: discomfort, unfamiliarity and without adequate preparation.

Of course he did what he could. When faced with difficult circumstances, Ricciardo is a guy who likes to grin and bear it, but this wasn’t the ideal preparation. Perhaps the lure of a return to Red Bull F1 was too great, but the tempting carrot at the end of the stick always seemed too far out of reach.

Those deemed not good enough are quickly thrown to the side of the road unless a driver has a catalog of good rides. This earned recognition for both Ricciardo and Perez

Under the auspices of Red Bull, Ricciardo had driven the RB19 at a Silverstone test in 2023 as part of his third driving role with the team. The claim was that the eight-time Grand Prix winner had set a lap good enough for the front row of this year’s Grand Prix, a notion expressed in an episode of Drive to Survive that was emerging To sensationalize history. Is Red Bull, a championship-winning Formula 1 team, completely committed to superstition – so much so that it willfully ignores the differences in track conditions and tires? Maybe they really wanted to get rid of de Vries; Maybe it really believed it could “rehabilitate” Ricciardo.

Here Red Bull’s own vision of the past created a camera obscura effect. It’s entirely true that Ricciardo was the better driver in 2016 and 2017; Verstappen was still very young and tended to make one or two high-pressure mistakes between successful drives and daring overtaking maneuvers. In 2018, Verstappen was the front runner. The narrative at the time was that Ricciardo suffered more than his fair share of reliability issues, but in reality Verstappen led qualifying outright 15-6 and began to find an increasing advantage over his more experienced teammate as the season progressed.

Ricciardo was absolutely brilliant in China, and his victory in Monaco was a feel-good redemption story after Red Bull’s own mistakes in the pit lane cost him the year before. But those were his last two really great rides. His decision to move to Renault in 2019 was not at all well received by Red Bull, but in the cold light of the stopwatch’s dim LCD screen he found himself moving further and further away from Verstappen.

It reveals a greater duality in Red Bull’s driver management structure. Those deemed not good enough are quickly thrown to the side of the road unless a driver has a catalog of good rides. This earned recognition for both Ricciardo and Perez, and so the team stuck with both drivers for far too long, trying to rediscover a long-faded banner of performance.

Blind faith in the results of past years rather than looking to the future revealed problems in Red Bull’s driver management structure

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

The well had dried up twice, but Christian Horner and Helmut Marko both stared at it, blindly hoping that the water would reappear. For a team that is notoriously unsentimental, sentiment has taken over – and it’s missing out on the driver market because it simply can’t look beyond itself.

Lawson may or may not be the right driver for the team – his performance alone will determine that. The team might have been better off putting aside its prejudices and promoting Tsunoda, but just as it spent too long on Ricciardo and Perez, it equally short-changed the Japanese driver.

Be that as it may, the earlier experiment with Ricciardo now appears to be a waste of time – the attempt to save the Australian’s Formula 1 career has completely destroyed it. And that also had the negative effect that there was less attention when comparing Tsunoda and Lawson. Lawson therefore has a big task ahead of him in getting to terms with Verstappen – and he hopes the lack of comparable seats in 2024 won’t affect his preparations too much.

This won’t bother Red Bull because whatever happens, they have Max Verstappen. But one day that won’t be the case – and if the driver pipeline continues to be marred by indecision and inertia, the team will have solved its own problems in formulating a succession plan.

What will Red Bull do if Verstappen ends his career?

Photo by: Lubomir Asenov / Motorsport Images