'I fear this could be a nasty turn of events for Tsunoda'
Interview
- Ludo van Denderen
For Liam Lawson, the adventure at Red Bull Racing has been extremely short-lived. For two grands prix, the New Zealander was Max Verstappen's teammate, but from the next race in Japan, Yuki Tsunoda will step into the RB21. It is a switch that Jan Lammers has mixed thoughts about.
First of all, a disclaimer: Jan Lammers wants to stress that he does not know all the exact details that underpinned Red Bull's decision to replace Lawson, matters that he believes were also mostly at play during the winter break. "Having said that, it is of course very early in the season," the former F1 driver reveals to GPblog.
"It has been two separate races. One because of the weather conditions and in the second there was an outlier of the difficulty of finding the right set-up for the current Red Bull car."
In the latter, the duo of Verstappen and Gianpiero Lambiase succeeded better than Lawson with his race engineer, Lammers observes. "While Liam Lawson still has to fine-tune himself and also that car. Only when a car is driven at its limit do you gather relevant information. Liam was not yet up for that, so then you can't do much about the setup either. So yes, it couldn't have turned out worse for Liam."
Lammers fears for Tsunoda
It will only become clear in the long term whether the Tsunoda-Lawson switch was the right decision. "Who am I to judge whether that is good or bad? But what is going to be a fact is that we are going to see the consequences of this decision for a long time. Because first of all, the Racing Bull turns out to be a very good car after all. And the Racing Bulls also turns out to be a car that has a bigger window in terms of setup than the Red Bull."
"So Liam Lawson, with his experience at Suzuka, with a car that is somewhat user-friendly, then you just have a chance that Liam Lawson will then go faster than Tsunoda. I'm afraid this could still be a very nasty turn of events for Tsunoda."
Lammers added: "I wouldn't agree wholeheartedly that Tsunoda should be happy about this. Maybe in the longer term, but one thing is clear: switching back [Lawson to Red Bull and Tsunoda to Racing Bulls] after this would be a very crazy sensation. It's an exceptionally complicated situation, where you're not going to see the consequences of the decision until much later in the season."
"That there is a lot of turmoil, doubt and uncertainty [in the team], that is also clear."