Ever since Liam Lawson got the pink slip at Red Bull, there have been contrasting reactions in the F1 community. While many justify Red Bull’s decision to replace Lawson with Yuki Tsunoda, as he was struggling badly, several others feel that the Austrian outfit have been quite brutal with the Kiwi.
After all, they have arrived at this decision after just two race weekends, which is the shortest stint for any full-time Red Bull driver in history. Many people in the motorsport community, like Will Buxton, Scott McLaughlin, and Giedo van der Garde, among others, have criticized Red Bull’s ruthless decision-making about their driver lineup.
Buxton even said that they made this decision mainly to safeguard Christian Horner and Helmut Marko’s positions for choosing Lawson in the first place. There was a notion that had they persisted with Lawson in the car, these decision makers could’ve paid the price with their jobs later on.
However, former F1 team principal Otmar Szafnauer has backed Horner’s call to sack Lawson before his struggles got out of hand. He reasoned that Red Bull have done the right thing from a long-term perspective.
“[When] you look back and say, ‘maybe we didn’t make the right decision’, it’s better to stand up, raise your hand and say, ‘Look, we tried, maybe this wasn’t the best decision for us’. Therefore, we are gonna change it,” Szafnauer said on The Race’s Team Principal podcast.
“That’s better than sticking with your wrong decision for a long time and then realizing it wasn’t the right decision,” he added.
Helmut Marko spoke with Motorsport on why Red Bull replacing Liam Lawson with Yuki Tsunoda. pic.twitter.com/BaIZAuklDw
— Motorsport.com (@Motorsport) March 29, 2025
While the former Aston Martin boss didn’t say much about Lawson’s potential, he gave his perspective on the wider scenario at Red Bull. Naturally, the Milton Keynes team suffered due to promoting the Kiwi driver after just 11 race starts, even though they had Tsunoda, who had raced in 80+ races over the past four years.
Have Red Bull made the right call to promote Tsunoda
IndyCar racer and Lawson’s compatriot McLaughlin feels that Tsunoda may suffer the same fate as his predecessor, not because he isn’t good enough, but due to Red Bull’s broken system of making young drivers scapegoats, even though their car is one of the root causes of their struggles.
Szafnauer, however, is positive about the Japanese driver’s prospects for the next weekend in Suzuka. He thinks it is the perfect race [his home race] for his Red Bull debut. “I think Yuki will go well in Japan.” And even though he may sympathize with Lawson as an individual, he claims to understand Red Bull’s decision to promote Tsunoda as the more experienced driver.
Even Marko stated that the New Zealander seemed like these couple of races in Red Bull colors sapped away all of his confidence. Horner also commented that they have made the decision to swap Lawson with Tsunoda to protect the #30 driver from getting burned out under pressure at Red Bull.
Time will tell if it was a confidence issue for Lawson or if the car was actually the root of his struggles, as many have suggested. Szafnauer claimed that we will get to know this week in Japan—what’s the reality from both Lawson and Tsunoda’s perspectives.
