Horner says Lawson 'can't be blamed' for crash in Australia

Horner on Lawson's crash

Even the official starting grid was shared by the FIA when it was announced that Liam Lawson will start from the pit lane. Red Bull changed the rear and beam wing for car number 30. "We changed the car, so to put a bit more downforce on the car. It's a very hard track to overtake at. We took the risk of leaving him out long, because he was outside the points. And we thought, roll the dice, maybe it'll come right. But exactly at the point that it started to rain more, so it's difficult to blame him for that last spin," Horner began to GPblog among others about Lawson's performance.

Still Horner saw a positive moment Lawson can build on in the future. "I think the one flash of light that he can take out of it is that on the dry tyres he actually posted the second fastest lap time of the Grand Prix, 1:22.9, versus Max's 1:23.0, Lando [had a] 1:22.1. So I think if there was one positive we can say, it's that his pace on the dry was not too bad."

Horner protects Lawson on qualifying

Lawson did not have the best of weekends up until the Grand Prix itself either. A power unit prevented him from setting a single lap at all in FP3, and then he made to mistakes in Q1, leading to him getting eliminated early on.

About Lawson's qualifying, Horner stated, "The problem is, having missed P3, you are on the back foot, and then the pressure builds. He grabbed the brake on the second set of tyres, and then the third set of tyres, he was half a second up, and then another mistake there. Next weekend will be tough because there's a sprint race for the track that he's not been to before. But he's pretty resilient. This weekend wasn't representative of what he's capable of."

This article was written in collaboration with Sandy van Wijngaarden

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