'Faultless' Lawson makes the case for Red Bull promotion

“I think if you’re getting into a spat and getting your elbows out with Fernando on your first race back you’re doing all right,” said Christian Horner.

“And I think that he drove an exceptional race today, from 19th to ninth. He was fast, he was courageous. And I thought it was an excellent comeback for him.”

“Very impressive,” Helmut Marko told Motor Sport. “It started with P3 in Q1. And starting from P19 and to finish P9, and be quick both tyres, a very good racer in fights – Alonso was complaining!

“We took the engine penalty here because you can overtake, and the engine was on the limit, so it was the best, and we thought it takes the pressure away. We didn’t expect him to be as strong as he was…”

While Lawson is clearly guaranteed a job with RB next season, he is also auditioning for Red Bull. Whether that results him in racing alongside Max Verstappen as early as 2025 remains to be seen.

Despite the fact that Sergio Perez has a contract it remains a scenario that could yet unfold, should Lawson do enough in the coming weeks to justify a change.

He gave a good account of himself in his five races last year, especially when he finished in the points in Singapore.

However memories in F1 are short, and over his 12 months on the sidelines in the reserve role he’s very much been in the shadows as the likes of Oliver Bearman and Franco Colapinto have come along.

A “use him or lose him” contractual option focused the minds of the Red Bull management, and with Ricciardo failing to perform to expectations, the youngster was fast tracked into a race seat.

He’s been well prepared. In addition to the hours of sim work in Milton Keynes in recent months he’d been given some valuable Pirelli test mileage with both the Red Bull and RB.

Nevertheless other than a Super Formula event in Japan late last year he had not undertaken a full race weekend since Qatar 53 weeks earlier – and what’s more it was a sprint with just an FP1 session with which to become acclimatised to an unfamiliar track, and with new parts to assess as well.

In SQ1 he was 11th and just ahead of Tsunoda, and then in SQ2 he didn’t get a perfect lap and earned 12th, immediately behind Tsunoda and – perhaps significantly – Perez.

“I knew we had performance in the car, and I knew we didn’t maximise it,” he said. “I made a mistake in SQ2 and went wide and had a bit of a slow lap, and I was frustrated because I knew the performance of the car.”

Perhaps a little rusty he lost three places at the start of the sprint, and found himself battling with Alonso, who called the “AlphaTauri” driver an “idiot.” Still trying to get a handle on tyre management, Lawson finished 16th.

“It’s tricky, because it’s even lap-by-lap,” he said after the flag. “If you over push a lap and struggle with the tyres, then very quickly, even in that same lap, you can struggle the next few corners.

“So it’s finding that balance which is what we were trying to do. And I think we understood a good amount afterwards, looking through the data.”

And what of that Alonso spat?

“He was really upset. I’m not sure why, we were racing for P16, and I don’t know why he was upset. It is what it is. Hopefully he can get over it, and we’ll move forward.

“I understand here that he had a pretty horrible race, so I can understand why he’s upset. But if I did anything wrong, I would have got a penalty.”

If Friday was a learning experience the lessons were put to good use in main qualifying. With the penalty Lawson was only ever going to make a proper effort in Q1, and he did it in some style as he took third place.

A third set of soft tyres helped, but nevertheless a VCARB shouldn’t have been there. As he drove back to the pits knowing that his Q2 role would be to tow Tsunoda he said “such a shame,” referencing the penalty. “You did what you had to do,” his engineer replied.

“The goal was obviously to make the most of Q1, to put everything together,” he said when Motor Sport asked him about his session. “And I think that’s what we did.”

So how frustrating was it to have his hands tied by the penalty when he so wanted to make an impression first time out?

“It’s more just frustrating because the performance of the car, the pace, was really strong in Q1,” he said. “We’d only really improve from there is the idea. So there were plenty of positives going forwards.

“It just feels a bit of a waste. But I understand as well why we’re doing this. It completely makes sense. We didn’t know it was going to be like this. Racing’s a whole other story as well. Today’s race was tough, and I’m sure tomorrow’s will be challenging as well.

Come Sunday afternoon and his second start of the weekend he showed that he’d learned, and helped by a tangle ahead he jumped Ocon, Albon, Bottas, Colapinto and Zhou to slot into an initial 14th.

“First lap was good,” he said. “It was obviously carnage at Turn 1. And I was just in a good place, and managed to get around it. And then from there, I just settled in, and the hard tyre worked really, really well for us.”

He then survived another tussle with Alonso without too much drama: “He was actually nice today! I expected him to fight me a little bit more, but it was good. I think it was smart from both of us, for that part of the race. It was very early on, and I think the hard was working for us quite well at that point.”

On the hard tyre he rose to seventh place before finally pitting on lap 37. He resumed in 11th before gaining a couple of spots when rivals stopped to be ninth at the flag – a remarkable 10-place gain.

Meanwhile his team-mate Yuki Tsunoda used a more traditional medium-hard strategy and, after a spin, was only 14th. Perhaps more importantly in the bigger scheme of things Perez had another low-key weekend on the way to seventh, just 11 seconds ahead of Lawson.

“What a statement!” RB CEO Peter Bayer told me after the race. “First weekend in the car, and honestly we thought that probably with the penalty that yesterday’s P3 in Q1, that was a high, and we should be proud and happy.

“He did a very good job in Turn 1 there with a bit of turmoil, and kept it clean. And then he was faultless in the end. He did very good laps, good pace. I think what played into his hands is that the overcut was a lot stronger than we thought.

“With the hard, we were expecting to go long, but the way it turned out, it was definitely more than what we had calculated for. So that was great. And then in the end he was managing it really well. And he also said he felt very comfortable in the car.

“He was working a lot more with the switches than he usually would have done. He’s a bit tired, but overall, honestly, a very, very impressive performance.”

However fit you are a first race distance in 12 months was never going to be easy, and keeping those hard tyres alive for such a long stint was also far from straightforward.

“A big step with the car from yesterday, which is really positive,” said Lawson. “It’s hard to do that in the weekends, from where you start it’s hard to really make a big step like that. And I think we did that because of how hard the guys worked on the car.

“It was definitely tricky, but the car was working well. And when you have a car that’s doing exactly what you want it to do, it puts you in a good window.

“I’ve also been preparing pretty hard for this for the last 12 months. I knew that at some point the opportunity should come. So training-wise, we’ve been working very hard at being ready for it.

“Obviously, I’ve got a goal, I’ve got to stay in F1. I know these races are very important. So it’s doing exactly what I’m here to do. We have five more very important races as well to focus on.

“There’s quite a few tracks that I haven’t done before that are going to be tricky, very challenging. Physically challenging tracks as well, sprint weekends like this.

“I think this weekend was potentially the hardest. So to get it out of the way and be in a comfortable place with the car is important.”

Lawson now has to use those five races to really stake his claim to an early promotion. As noted Perez has a firm contract, and the Mexican is fully confident that he’ll be racing in 2025.

However anything can happen in this sport, as we have seen. So what does Lawson need to do in the coming weeks?

“The start was already impressive,” Marko told me. “Keep going like that for the next five races. First we want to see comparison between Yuki and him. Then we see. At the moment we hope [Perez] can raise his game, so we are better in the constructors’ championship, because [the fight with] Ferrari is very tight.”

In the end the big picture of scoring points is what matters. After Sunday’s race Horner made a pointed comment about the Ferrari one-two.

“This weekend they’ve been very, very strong,” said the RBR boss. “And they’ve got two drivers that are competing at the front. And McLaren, likewise their drivers, there’s not a big deficit between them. So that’s where we really need, for the constructors’, to have Checo come into play…”