Was Red Bull's decision to swap Liam Lawson with Yuki Tsunoda just two races into the 2025 F1 season the wrong call, or has Red Bull management displayed sound judgement by admitting to a mistake and taking immediate corrective action?
On the latest instalment of The Race's newest F1 podcast - The Team Principal Podcast with Otmar Szafnauer - Otmar gives his take on Red Bull's latest controversial driver move.
As well as being unsurprised this swap has come so early in the season, Otmar's view is sympathetic to the Red Bull senior management justification: basically that it's better to act now than to wait, especially as Red Bull is in a unique position to do so because it owns two teams.
Otmar also thinks a situation that on the face of it "looks bleak" for Lawson, in fact isn't - because his F1 career is prolonged, he has the opportunity to bounce back, and there's recent historical precedent for ex-Red Bull drivers doing just that.
"People will look at it and say, 'Liam was demoted', but if you're a talented driver and you just haven't had the break to make it into Formula 1 - and there's a few of them - they would welcome a demotion to another Formula 1 team," Otmar explains.
"So, although it looks like it's a demotion going from Red Bull to Racing Bulls, it's still a Formula 1 drive. Liam can still, at Racing Bulls, hone his skills. He can still get used to what it's like driving in Formula 1. He can still perform well at Racing Bulls - and then in the future you never know, maybe get promoted back up.
"So although it looks bleak, it's not for Liam. The question for me is, he definitely has potential - was he given enough time at Red Bull to realise that potential? Where on the learning curve was he? Should he have been given more than two races?"
This is at the crux of attempting to understand Red Bull's thinking here. Has it been prescient in acting now, before any apparent rot set in further with Lawson, or is this going to turn out to be a failed gamble on top of a failed gamble?
"What you're trying to do is forecast the future, with all the information you have," Otmar adds. "Then when you're in that future and that future becomes the present, you can 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 and therefore we're going to change it'. That's better than sticking with your wrong decision for a long time, and then realising it wasn't the right decision and changing."
Otmar's view is perhaps indicative of the ruthless mindset needed when running an F1 team. The ultimate goal is constructors' championship success, and to achieve that you need two cars realising as close to their full potential as possible.
One Red Bull is clearly way off that potential after two races, so the thinking is to act decisively now rather than potentially throw away more points. But as Otmar himself points out, "it's not a controlled experiment".
"If Liam was going to stay where he showed in the first two races, you definitely make that decision now," Otmar says.
"What you're trying to do is guess how steep his learning curve was and how quickly he could get up that learning curve at Red Bull - and that's a hard thing to guess."
What does bode well for Lawson, potentially, is what happened with a driver Otmar eventually signed when he was running the Alpine F1 team: Pierre Gasly. His story is proof that a brutal demotion from Red Bull's main team doesn't necessarily mean it's the end of the road for your F1 career.
"The question for me is, now that you've changed is this the right decision? Or should you have stuck with it? And again, you're trying to predict the future," Otmar says.
"I think Yuki will go well in Japan. Probably couldn’t have been a better race track for him to start with - he knows it well. And it's a track where, if you have great experience there, you can eke out even more laptime than somebody who doesn't. The fact you've driven it a lot gives you more laptime than some other circuits.
"Let's see what happens. I totally understand the decision."
New for 2025, The Team Principal Podcast with Otmar Szafnauer takes you behind the scenes - and the headlines - in F1.
As well as offering his unique perspective on F1's big talking points, the former team principal of Racing Point, Alpine and Aston Martin will be joined by guests, including current and former F1 team principals, to discuss the thorny business of running a modern F1 race team.
