Christian Horner says Red Bull will do their best to support struggling Kiwi Liam Lawson

Monday, 24 March 2025

Red Bull Formula 1 boss Christian Horner says the team will do its best to support struggling Kiwi Liam Lawson.

Lawson registered a second point-less showing on the new F1 season, finishing 16th on the track before being elevated to 12th in Sunday night’s Chinese Grand Prix.

Lawson finished 14th in the sprint race in China on Saturday and after he also qualified 18th then crashed out in wet conditions at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne, there is plenty of noise around how secure his Red Bull seat is – or isn’t.

Soon after the cars crossed the line in Shanghai, a report from Autosport suggested Lawson could be replaced by Racing Bulls driver Yuki Tsunoda - as early as before the Japanese Grand Prix - the next stop on the F1 calendar on April 6.

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In his post-race media conference, Horner was hit with multiple questions around Lawson’s future.

“There’s always going to be speculation in the paddock,” Horner said. “We’ve only just finished the race here. We’ll take away the info and have a good look at it.

“Everything is purely speculative at the moment. As I said, we’ve just finished this race. We’re going to take away the info and have a good look at it.”

Horner downplayed the importance of any meeting to discuss Lawson and potentially even replacing him for Japan.

“I’m not even going to comment on a change, because that’ll be your first headline,” he said.

“We’re two races into this championship. We have a sample of two – we have quite a bit of information. We’re going to go away and have a good look at it and work with Liam and do the best that we can for him.

“There’s so much info, how he’s adapted to driving the car, and what he’s getting from the car. What can we do to help? Where are his major issues, what’s causing inconsistency?”

After the season-opening Australian Grand Prix last weekend, controversial Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko said of Lawson: “We have to let him cool down a bit now and observe his development over the first three to five races.”

But after the 23-year-old’s qualifying failure in China, Marko said: “This is not what we expected.”

He then noted that Hadjar’s form had been “absolutely fascinating,” adding: “The sun [Hadjar] and the shadow [Lawson] are close together and we'll see what happens.”

The same evening, Tsunoda fuelled speculation of a driver swap by saying he would “100%” be ready to drive for Red Bull at the next Grand Prix, in his native Japan.

Red Bull made a late change to Lawson’s suspension set up - that incurred the penalty of starting from pit lane - in a bid to find some improvements but the Kiwi driver said it did not work.

'We tried to do something aggressive with the set-up, mostly to learn something, to get an idea,“ Lawson said.

'We definitely learned something but it just didn’t work today.'

Despite the results not being what Red Bull wanted, Horner said they would work hard to improve after China.

“I think Liam’s had a tough, tough couple of races, a tough weekend here,” Horner said.

“We elected to take him off the grid, out of parc fermé to do a significant setup change. And so we’ve managed to get 56 laps of reasonable data. From that, obviously we’ll take that away and we’ll have a good look at it. And as a group, we’ll do our best to support him.”