Red Bull dropped Liam Lawson as the teammate of Formula 1 champion Max Verstappen after just two rounds of the season and replaced him with Yuki Tsunoda on Thursday.
\nLawson was given the Red Bull seat despite not having previously driven a full F1 season and struggled immediately. The New Zealander did not score any points, crashed out of the season-opening Australian Grand Prix and qualified in last place for the Chinese Grand Prix and its sprint race.
\nTsunoda moves up from Red Bull\u2019s second team, Racing Bulls, in time for his home Japanese GP next week. Lawson will take Tsunoda\u2019s place at Racing Bulls alongside rookie Isack Hadjar.
\nThe change is a sign of how cut-throat F1 can be and an admission that Red Bull made the wrong choice in picking Lawson. He completed only 11 career F1 races before this season and was typically slower than Tsunoda across their six races as teammates last year.
\n\u201cIt has been difficult to see Liam struggle with the (car) at the first two races and as a result we have collectively taken the decision to make an early switch,\u201d The Associated Press quoted Red Bull team principal Christian Horner as saying in a statement.
\n\u201cWe came into the 2025 season with two ambitions, to retain the world drivers\u2019 championship and to reclaim the world constructors\u2019 title and this is a purely sporting decision.\u201d
\nHorner acknowledged there was work to be done with the team\u2019s RB21 car and said Tsunoda\u2019s experience will prove beneficial in helping to develop it.
\n\u201cWe have a duty of care to protect and develop Liam and, together, we see that after such a difficult start it makes sense to act quickly so Liam can gain experience, as he continues his F1 career with Racing Bulls, an environment and a team he knows very well,\u201d Horner said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Red Bull dropped Liam Lawson as the teammate of Formula 1 champion Max Verstappen after just two rounds of the season and replaced him with Yuki Tsunoda on Thursday. Lawson was given the Red Bull seat despite not having previously driven a full F1 season and struggled immediately. The New Zealander did not score any …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45367,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45370"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45371,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45370\/revisions\/45371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}