Liam Lawson’s first Formula 1 qualifying session with Red Bull couldn’t have gone much worse.
On Friday he described himself as “comfortable, just too slow” behind the wheel but in Saturday qualifying at the Australian Grand Prix he didn’t look particularly comfortable either - and was certainly still not fast.
There are obvious caveats, as his team boss Christian Horner pointed out. “Unlucky with Liam, missing FP3 [because of a power unit issue] on a track he had very little experience at, put him on the backfoot,” Horner told Sky Sports F1.
All of that is true, Lawson was the only 2025 F1 driver not to have raced in Albert Park prior to this weekend and missing FP3 was a critical blow to his qualifying preparation.
But Lawson knows he still underperformed badly in his first competitive session in the senior team, going off into the gravel at Turn 3 on his second run and off at the penultimate corner on his third and final run.
That left him relying on his run one banker which was only good enough for 18th place, only outqualifying the struggling Haas duo, one of whom (Ollie Bearman) didn’t even set a lap.
“We definitely overheated [the tyres] at the end of the lap, but obviously it's something we will look into,” Lawson said.
“Would it have helped doing FP3? I think today was a sort of quali prep day. Everybody was using soft tyres this morning.
“I think we had the car in a good window. Honestly, it wasn't bad and the lap we were on was perfectly fine.
“I just had a snap through the high speed that overheated the tyres, and then the last sector was basically gone from there.”
'Being stupid'
The problem was it wasn’t simply Lawson not getting a clean lap that led to his Q1 exit. The snap Lawson mentions took place at Turn 9/10 but just before that he was already slower than the 15th place driver in Q1 Gabriel Bortoleto’s first two sectors (who later improved anyway), so a messy final sector simply confined him to 18th rather than 15th or 16th.
Team-mate Max Verstappen starts third.
Lawson’s losses to Verstappen are clear and numerous through the data. At the Turn 6 right-hander which sets you up for the long-run to the high-speed Turn 9/10 corners, Lawson’s 11km/h (7mph) slower than Verstappen and carries that penalty through the exit.
Missing practice three and a chance to tune the car to help reduce that gap would have hurt. But it wasn't as if Lawson was any closer to Verstappen on Friday.
That will be tough for Lawson to swallow. Nobody was expecting him to jump in and match Verstappen but given adaptability has been a hallmark of his career so far, he’ll be disappointed to be starting so far off.
“Missing FP3 this morning was really costly for us, not really doing much quali prep for today,” Lawson said when asked why his previous trait of jumping into a new car and performing straight away has eluded him.
“And I don't think it's car specific. It's not like this car is way harder to drive and that is why I made mistakes.
“It's just, I think, a tough track, lack of driving, and then being stupid.”
Echoes of the past
This is an all too familiar story for Verstappen’s Red Bull team-mates. It was Melbourne where Pierre Gasly’s Red Bull debut began with a miserable Q1 exit in 2019, albeit one with the caveat of the team misjudging the track improvement that doesn’t apply to Lawson.
A huge grid penalty made Alex Albon’s first Red Bull qualifying at the 2019 Belgian GP largely irrelevant but even he escaped Q1.
Sergio Perez was 11th on his first weekend at the team but that felt like more of an outlier among a strong start to life at Red Bull than Lawson’s qualifying does.
Lawson’s Q1 exit was far more in keeping with the six Q1 exits that contributed to Red Bull finally running out of patience with Perez last year.
There’s also the painful contrast of Yuki Tsunoda, who he beat to the Red Bull promotion, qualifying fifth and doing so within two tenths of Verstappen - a zone Lawson would love to be in.
It’s still just one qualifying session. All is far from lost. There’s a potentially rain-affected race that could help (or hinder) Lawson’s comeback.
But the fact is the Australian GP weekend has been a nightmare from start to finish for Lawson so far.
If Red Bull was hoping Lawson’s strong prior adaptability would provide some temporary relief from its second driver headache, it was badly mistaken on the evidence of Melbourne.
