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Red Bull believes Liam Lawson's similar driving style to Max Verstappen will allow the team to run its 2025 Formula 1 cars in a closer set-up window than it has been able to previously.
Lawson will replace Sergio Perez for 2025 and will be Verstappen's fifth team-mate at the senior Red Bull team.
Like two of his predecessors, Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon, he is being promoted to race alongside the now four-time F1 champion from Red Bull's junior team.
Speaking to media including The Race, team principal Christian Horner conceded that "circumstances have dictated" Lawson's promotion to the senior Red Bull team "be accelerated" earlier than planned.
But asked if there was "a risk of a repeat of what happened with Pierre and Alex" - who were promoted after 26 and 12 grands prix starts respectively and were comprehensively outclassed by Verstappen - Horner said: "The danger is there's a repeat of that.
"But I think that Liam is a different character. He's a different personality to be able to deal with that pressure.
"And I think he's shown real resilience and strength of character with the opportunity that’s been provided to have to turn up and get on with it and deliver."
The cars Gasly and Albon drove were arguably the worst Red Bull has produced for notable instances of rear instability, which Verstappen could handle but others could not.
Verstappen's preference is for a 'pointy' front end that allows for the car to be rotated quicker and as Red Bull's 2022 and 2023 cars in particular moved more towards his style they moved away from Perez's sweet spot.
But Horner said Lawson's similar driving style to Verstappen should make both the team's job in balancing its cars and Lawson's in adapting to his situation easier.
"He drives the car in a similar fashion to Max. He doesn't shy away from having a very positive front end in the car," said Horner.
"So I think in terms of driving characteristics, it will be easier for the cars to run more closely together in set-up."
What is a pointy front end?
Ben Anderson
Verstappen's preference for a pointy front end - a super-responsive one - allows him to get the car turned in quicker than if the front end was lazier or less responsive.
This theoretically allows him to get the car pointing straighter sooner in the cornering phase, which in turn means (provided there's sufficient traction) he can get the throttle applied earlier, harder and thus accelerate quicker out of the corners.
The penalty for that is the rear end breaking away at a potentially uncontrollable rate, but Verstappen's apparent skill is that he can live with an unbelievably nervous rear end and make it work.
It also means that in high-speed corners, like the ones you find in sector two at Spa, he doesn't get spooked by the rear moving around, so the team can theoretically add more front wing and improve that responsiveness through the types of corners where other drivers would usually be chasing the opposite: stability at the rear in order to have the confidence to carry the necessarily high cornering speeds.
So Verstappen will be faster than, say, Perez through these corners because the front end isn't scrubbing speed through the corner from the tyres being slightly underloaded.
To put it most simply, the threshold at which Verstappen senses oversteer in a car to the point of it being a problem seems to be way in excess of the point most drivers would feel that same degree of oversteer and find it a problem they cannot drive around.
Horner also said Red Bull anticipated its 2025 car being more adaptable than the RB20 of 2024.
"The other factor that we're focused very hard on is making sure that we're creating a wider operating window with RB21 than RB20's very narrow, very peaky performance window," he said, in response to a question from The Race about the challenge of being a second Red Bull driver alongside Verstappen.
"So for us, to create a broader window will hopefully only help Liam find a more, perhaps forgiving car than RB20 could be on occasion."
A question of character - and expectations
Lawson has the fewest grand prix starts of any driver promoted from Red Bull's junior to senior team and his level of experience, and what Red Bull had seen in his 11 F1 race weekends, was also put to Horner.
In a detailed answer in which he referenced the comparison to Yuki Tsunoda, who he acknowledged Red Bull might have to allow to move on, Horner said there was "very, very little to choose between them" but felt Lawson's "potential for growth is still significant".
He returned to Lawson's "attitude and his ability to deal with pressure", too, with a direct reference to the weather-affected Brazilian Grand Prix weekend.
There, fellow 'rookie' drivers Ollie Bearman and Franco Colapinto - who both had standout performances during their limited appearances in 2024 - both toiled in the wet and had arguably their worst F1 weekends to date: Bearman had multiple offs including a spin after clipping the back of Colapinto's Williams, while Colapinto crashed heavily under a safety car.
Lawson, by contrast, fended off Perez in wheel-to-wheel battle and also withstood late pressure from Lewis Hamilton to finish ninth behind Tsunoda as RB took its only Sunday double-points finish of the season.
"Brazil was an interesting one where all the rookies looked a little bit like rookies this year. Liam didn't drop the car. He didn't make any mistakes," said Horner. "He's looked a seasoned campaigner.
"If you look at his performances, he's agile as well. We put him in a DTM car for a year alongside Alex Albon, he was very quick in that.
"He races hard, and he's got broad shoulders, and I think you need that to be in that seat. Checo, certainly, for three of the four years, coped with that pressure and comparison very well.
"And I think Liam has got the right character to be able to cope with the pressure [of] being Max's team-mate and the expectations on him are very clear."
Horner added that "one of the things we'll be looking to protect Liam from is expectation" in respect of comparisons to Verstappen, saying his objective would be to get as close as he could to Verstappen so "we don't have a 285-point deficit between the cars" as Red Bull did between Verstappen and Perez in the final 2024 drivers' standings.
"Of course, when Alex and Pierre were with the team, Max wasn't a four-time world champion. He hadn't won a world championship at that point," said Horner, asked by The Race whether Red Bull needed to make longer-term changes to its junior driver programme.
"We have a very clear positioning in the team with where Max is at in his career and what we need from the second driver."
