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The wording around Red Bull’s Liam Lawson announcement is very 2024-focused, but there is an unspoken 2025 element here - and it is not about Red Bull's second team.
Daniel Ricciardo’s exit obviously opens the door to this being a full-time RB seat for Lawson to occupy beyond the remaining six grands prix. That is a no-brainer.
However, this hasn’t been confirmed. The most logical answer for ‘why’ is that Lawson might not be in the RB next season after all.
It feels increasingly like Red Bull sees this end-of-2024 cameo as a way to evaluate Lawson as, instead, a potential replacement for Sergio Perez at the main team.
Perez’s place seems perfectly secure for the rest of 2024 now, after pre-summer break he had looked on the brink of the fate that befell Ricciardo instead. He’s safe since a summer reset, despite Red Bull’s own form deteriorating and Perez having a terrible Singapore event that was fortunately, for him, overshadowed by the Ricciardo storyline.
Red Bull’s recognised that its short-term 2024 priority is fixing its underperforming car. It has already lost the constructors’ championship lead to McLaren and it is trying to get Verstappen’s drivers’ title over the line. The driver issue can wait – at least for now. Team boss Christian Horner said only last weekend that Red Bull needed to work out a bigger picture than just whether Ricciardo was replaced or not.
So, there is zero guarantee that Red Bull will keep Perez for 2025.
If he continues to disappoint, or show fluctuating form, he will be massively vulnerable again. And he might be ousted anyway if Lawson steps in and thrives in the RB. That's what further validates the theory this is a 2025 Red Bull seat audition - either it is being viewed that way directly by Red Bull, or it will naturally become that if Lawson excels.
Establishing Lawson’s viability as a top-line Red Bull driver has to be the play here. Especially as Red Bull must already know all it needs to about how legitimate his candidacy is for a 2025 RB seat.
After all, he did a strong job and scored points standing in for Ricciardo for a few races last year - and it isn’t like Lawson has stunning competition to be Yuki Tsunoda’s team-mate, if that is all that’s on the cards for him.
Red Bull has been linked with a move for Williams’s eye-catching stand-in driver Franco Colapinto, which would obviously be for RB. But as erratic as Helmut Marko’s driver scouting process is, it would be a big surprise if Colapinto was suddenly ahead of Lawson in the pecking order.
More likely is that grabbing Colapinto appeals more than putting F2 frontrunner Isack Hadjar in the RB seat. A Hadjar promotion would be more like the Red Bull of old, backing its talents regardless of any hesitations, whereas now it is more vulnerable to second-guessing its talents.
Hadjar has had a rollercoaster F2 season and didn’t impress Red Bull on his FP1 outing for the main team at Silverstone. He can’t be ruled out of the RB running, of course, but Red Bull was thought to be plotting a reserve driver role and two-year-old car testing programme for him in 2025.
The point is that Lawson is clearly at the front of a very short queue of Red Bull drivers. An RB seat feels like a lock – unless he is so bad in these six races that Red Bull loses faith in his competence entirely.
He is widely believed to have a contract that requires Red Bull to guarantee him an F1 race seat in one of its teams by the end of September.
Maybe handing him these final few races satisfies that – or maybe he’s now been guaranteed a seat for 2025, and it’s a question of which team he races for.
