If there is anyone at the Red Bull Formula 1 team who thinks dropping Liam Lawson would be a mistake, it is almost certainly Max Verstappen.
The prospect of another Verstappen team-mate biting the dust already seems real, despite Lawson only competing in two grands prix for Red Bull. This is for the crime of not being as good as Verstappen and not being able to rapidly get on top of a flawed car.
If, and it remains an if for now, Lawson does get replaced soon, then it would send a bad message to Verstappen that Red Bull still has not realised how problematic its car is.
He has been highlighting its vices for a couple of years now, if not longer, and felt ignored at times. And after Red Bull finally seemed to belatedly heed his cries last year, the RB21 hasn’t turned out to be the step on from its predecessor that Verstappen was hoping for.
It is not a slow car - it can be a very quick one in Verstappen’s hands - but it lacks grip on both axles and is prone to both understeer and sudden snaps.
Verstappen is clearly judging very well how much to load the front up without overloading the rear. His inputs compared to Lawson in China were vastly different.
For Verstappen, a corner entry starts with a gentle initial, early introduction blending into a nice, smooth arc, then a more aggressive input to rotate the car once he feels it will stick. Lawson was much more inconsistent, and jagged, with his inputs, as if he was trying to replicate something from Verstappen without really knowing what it was he was trying to do.
That was often leading to Lawson taking too much speed into the corner, on the wrong trajectory, causing the front axle to slide and the rear to step out. It looked a lot easier for Verstappen to get the car to the apex than Lawson, and he was able to correct the occasional kickback relatively gently.
In short, Verstappen induces fewer problems himself, and handles the car’s vices more effectively. And Red Bull, unsurprisingly, has had to yet again defend how it has developed the cars that only Verstappen seems to be able to drive well.
“In terms of finding the limit in a car that has inherent understeer, it's always going to be easier than finding the limit in a car that's a little bit more edgy,” team boss Christian Horner argued in China.
“If I think back to the beginning of '22, we had quite a stable car with quite a bit of understeer in it, which obviously Max hates. But we had an upgrade in Spain where we put a lot more front into the car and Max made a big step forward, Checo [Sergio Perez] sort of nosedived from that point.
“You've got to produce the quickest car and you're driven by the information that you have and the data that you have.
“As a team, we don't set out to make a car driver-centric, you just work on the info that you have and the feedback you have to produce the fastest car that you can.
“And that's obviously served us very well, with 122 victories.”
In Red Bull’s entire life as a team, yes. But more than half of those have come from Verstappen. And there might be a disconnect between how much Red Bull and Verstappen reckon that number is down to all-conquering Red Bulls or the driver handling them.
Certainly the last 12 months have featured a lot on Verstappen’s brilliance papering over the cracks. Red Bull keeps chewing up and spitting out second drivers and that’s either because the conveyor belt was throwing up useless talents (clearly not the case) or because the cars are simply too devoted to theoretical performance rather than usable characteristics.
Verstappen’s not intentionally pushed Red Bull in that direction, but his capacity to handle the consequences kept encouraging Red Bull to develop the car the way it felt was fastest. A string of battered team-mates is the result and over the last 12 months, as Red Bull lost an outright car performance advantage but maintained or even exaggerated its inherent tricky traits, the difference between how a world-class driver and a decent driver copes with that has become extremely pronounced, first with Sergio Perez and now much more drastically with Lawson.
Red Bull’s being punished for how it has prioritised car performance - putting pure aerodynamic load before a driveable balance, to pinch insight from The Race’s Mark Hughes. That was meant to be rectified on the RB21, which isn’t terrible, and has a balance Verstappen is not unhappy with, but it still isn’t where it needs to be. And that switch has potentially come at the cost of overall grip, too.
Verstappen has never been openly critical of the competence of his team-mates in the past and is not about to start now. In China, Verstappen told Dutch media that after Lawson compared similarly to Yuki Tsunoda when at the same team, suddenly the gap is “very big” and the sister cars “are also very close to me”.
If Verstappen is saying that in public - and other comments about it being a “tough battle to even stay up there” at the front - then you can be sure privately he has made his dissatisfaction with the lack of progress clear.
And while Verstappen seems to have a healthy attitude towards trying to address that, and has stayed calm so far, he will not indefinitely accept a car that does not respond as he wants it to, or a team that doesn't take full responsibility for the issues it causes its drivers.
Imagine how Verstappen will feel if Red Bull’s reaction to another team-mate obliteration is not to look inward, but instead to make that driver another scapegoat.
