Mark Hughes: 'Destroyed' Lawson could benefit from being dropped by Red Bull

Yet another Red Bull team mate of Max Verstappen’s is struggling to be competitive, Liam Lawson having qualified last in China last weekend after failing to get out of Q1 in Melbourne. He joins a long list over the last five years. Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon and Sergio Perez were never this far off, but the pattern is unmistakeable: Red Bull has followed where Verstappen’s enormous talent has taken them. But it’s made for a car no-one else can make competitive.

This looks a lot like Michael Schumacher at Benetton in 1994/95. There was of course a lot of controversy around the electronic systems on the Benetton in ’94 and it led to questions about whether his car was the same as that of his team-mates. But it was about more than that. JJ Lehto, Jos Verstappen and Johnny Herbert all had good reputations damaged by being his team-mate in a nervous car only he could properly exploit.

Listening to Max describe his car preferences, it sounds pretty much how Schumacher used to describe it.

Schumacher: “People say I like oversteer. I don’t. I can handle it and drive it but I don’t want it. With a neutral car you can have it sliding from turn-in to exit and all the time you can just drive on the limit of the four tyres’ given grip, and that’s what I’m always looking to achieve. I had cars that did that. With a little input you could make it go the way you wanted it to go.”

Verstappen: “I like a pointy car but with a rear that is just stable enough to have a controlled balance. I like a strong front end. I don’t really like understeer. It’s just killing the whole feel of the car. A strong front end with a rear that is just on the edge. But of course you still need that rear to rely on.”

It sounds simple, but what separates them from their team-mates is/was the feel for the transition, trading off rotation against scrub. Verstappen’s sim racing partner Atze Kerkhof is also an F1 driver coach and has studied intensely what Max does and how he makes it work. He relayed it on his YouTube channel. “When the Red Bull was a bit of a lazy car at the beginning of ’22 it was very easy to drive leaning towards understeer. Understeer is a very boring way to drive a car because whatever you do with the brake pedal, at a certain point the car doesn’t rotate any more. A pointy car wants to rotate more than you want and what Max does very well is he can balance the car that is too pointy for everyone else because for them it starts sliding. Max can make that car perfectly smooth and make use of that extra rotation and he can cancel it with his inputs in the points where he doesn’t need it. … the last five-tenths is dancing a very thin line, balancing the car and stepping away from the textbook style of aggressive on the brakes, very smooth coming off, turning at the right time. That’s still there in the basics but it needs to be adjusted intermittently in millimetres to have a positive effect on the balance.”