Liam Lawson's shortlived Red Bull career is fertile ground for much in the way of reflection. One particular side it reflects on is Red Bull's Formula 1 ecosystem, and specifically how it's made use of having four seats on the grid.
Red Bull's ownership of two separate F1 teams is supposed to be a big advantage. Certainly, McLaren chief Zak Brown has banged that particular drum for a couple of years now.
Now, Brown's main concern is the question of off-track political power, which is not the question here. But, from a wider perspective, it does feel intuitive to expect a significant benefit from having two connected teams. And if there's one area where it's most intuitive - you'd think! - it's matters of driver evaluation.
Unlike Mercedes and Ferrari, Red Bull does not have to beg and barter with engine customer teams to put its proteges into a car and then try to evaluate them from a distance. Unlike all of its main rivals, it never has to truly gamble on rookies - as Mercedes has with Kimi Antonelli or McLaren did with Oscar Piastri.
A second team helps in a lot of ways, but it should especially help when you're trialling and comparing drivers. It is a remarkable built-in advantage, almost a cheat code, when making line-up decisions, even before you consider Red Bull's contract structure that allows it to move drivers from Team A to Team B and back willy-nilly.
We hear it many times that the actual day-to-day grind of the F1 season is very different to an FP1 session. It is so much more valuable than a test or a sim run in separating the wheat from the chaff. And Racing Bulls gives Red Bull the chance to run A/B tests at will, and to have more knowledge than any of its rivals of how a prospective Red Bull Racing driver fares in real F1 scenarios.
Want to ask Racing Bulls for a detailed analysis of how Driver A compared against Driver B? You can - because those Racing Bulls analysts work for the same brand. In this matter, they are you and you are them and they work for your future.
Thus you should know a lot more about Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda and Isack Hadjar and others in the mix than Mercedes did about Antonelli and about George Russell, or McLaren did about Piastri and Lando Norris, or Ferrari did about Charles Leclerc. It is, by default, an advantage.
It is frankly remarkable how little Red Bull has made of this advantage since Max Verstappen's promotion.
The existence of then-Toro Rosso was a difference-maker in Verstappen choosing Red Bull over Mercedes back in 2014, which has obviously paid off spectacularly. But in the decade since that team's contribution in terms of driver selection has largely been in battle-proving young drivers that other non-Red Bull teams can then spend money on.
With Carlos Sainz loaned to Renault and then Gasly sold off to the same team, and with Alex Albon loaned and then released to Williams, it has been a bit 'Chelsea loan army', to use a football comparison. That team has signed a lot of players it has ended up loaning out to other teams because it doesn't have room for them, or they haven't been good enough.
But it's stopped even functioning in that way, mostly because Red Bull is in the bewildering position where it can scarcely afford to offload any prospect at all.
In a vacuum, the decision to shelve Lawson after two races is merely kind of an embarrassment.
But in this F1 reality - where Red Bull had Lawson in the sister team for double-digit races, could stick him into both a Red Bull car and an AlphaTauri/RB/Racing Bulls car virtually at will and had all the data it could ever need to form not just an appraisal of him as a Red Bull Racing driver but an appraisal of him against Tsunoda - it is unforgivable.
What other sport would this even fly in? Where else can executive decision-makers get away with stuff like this?
More on Tsunoda/Lawson swap
Red Bull is wasting its unique, controversial F1 driver advantage
Is Tsunoda doomed to fail at Red Bull too?
Red Bull rationale for brutal Lawson-Tsunoda U-turn explained
Red Bull replaces Lawson with Tsunoda - what you need to know
"Hey, we've looked at this guy extensively last year, but after these two races at tracks he doesn't know we've now realised he's actually Ferrari-era Luca Badoer - oops".
The only way to make it worse would be if this was the same decision-making process that had led to a struggling driver being extended on a multi-year deal under no pressure or leverage from his side, then that driver being bought out of that contract before that contract even started.
None of this is any shade on Racing Bulls - you'd rather have Racing Bulls than nothing, and the F1 grid has been verifiably enriched by Racing Bulls' presence. It's just very strange that it's increasingly non-Red Bull teams being enriched.
Gasly, Sainz, Albon are all assets elsewhere. Tsunoda was on the path to follow in their footsteps before getting this huge opportunity, which could yet prove a poisoned chalice. Red Bull will of course hope that it does not - but a positive outcome will still reflect terribly on its methodology.
Yes, the Red Bull is obviously a very different, tougher car than the VCARB lineage, but if this is not news to you and me it is not news to Red Bull. And the two possibilities are: either form at Racing Bulls does make it possible to extrapolate Red Bull performance - in which case why isn't this being done accurately? - or the cars are so different that any learnings are totally meaningless - in which case what are we even doing here?
Is it a talent pool problem, you may argue? To an extent, sure. But you cannot divorce that from the fact Red Bull seems to have lost the ability to use its second team as a trump card to snatch top talent from under its rivals' noses, the way it had done with Verstappen.
It's a chicken-and-egg situation - if the Red Bull Junior Team is struggling to unearth and secure market-leading talent, at least part of that has to be the fact that Racing Bulls is increasingly associated with drivers being demoted from Red Bull over drivers being promoted to Red Bull.
In this Lawson fiasco, the buck should not stop with him. He has struggled terribly but a 180-degree change of heart on him after two races is a signal of both almost pathological impulsiveness and a remarkable lack of conviction in the processes and evaluations that led to his promotion in the first place.
F1 is a sport of hyper-competence, of milliseconds, of state-of-the-art simulation tools and ruthless efficiency. A top team handling its line-up decisions in this way, and having the same people make these decisions year after year, whiff after whiff, is basically anathema to the very essence of this top-level championship. But it's the existence of Racing Bulls that truly tips it into the territory of ludicrous.
Depending on where you stand, this is either a strong argument for letting Red Bull keep its second team (because it's not capable of truly benefitting from it anyway, so it's fine) or making it offload the team (because this is making Racing Bulls almost axiomatically irrelevant).
