Photo: Red Bull
Red Bull has resolved its messy F1 driver situation for 2025, promoting Liam Lawson and Isack Hadjar, but are its chosen line-ups inspired or unprepared? Two Formula Scout writers have their say
An often dramatic and unpredictable Formula 1 silly season ahead of 2025 was finally concluded this week when Red Bull finalised the driver line-ups for its two teams.
Having waved goodbye to the underperforming Sergio Perez, it has handed Liam Lawson the daunting task of becoming team-mate to Max Verstappen at Red Bull Racing, opted to keep the more experienced Yuki Tsunoda at sister squad Racing Bulls for a fifth year and promoted Formula 2 runner-up Isack Hadjar to be his team-mate.
Here’s what Formula Scout’s writers made of the messy way the two outfits settled their 2025 line-ups, and which drivers they would have picked to put in both teams:
Talent deserves a chance, but not like this
Photo: John Cowpland / Toyota Gazoo Racing NZ
I feel sorry for Lawson. This is the dream drive he’s been aiming for since he was snapped up by Red Bull after his spectacular 2019 Toyota Racing Series campaign, but he goes in woefully underprepared for it with just 11 grand prix starts to his name.
Lawson has always had the raw talent to make it this far. The same confidence that enabled him to drive around the outside of a more experienced Marcus Armstrong in the wet on his TRS debut has been on show in his short F1 career so far, and is a vital ingredient to holding your own against the very best. But will that be enough to save him if he finds himself being dismantled by Verstappen in qualifying, as each of his predecessors have done?
The crazy thing is that Lawson could be going in with 34 F1 races under his belt had Red Bull not wasted its time trying to revive Daniel Ricciardo’s career in 2023, when it was abundantly clear from Lawson’s initial stand-in stint last year that he should have that drive. It could even be 46 races if Lawson had been chosen over Nyck de Vries at the start of that season.
In the end, he would spend hardly any of the the 12 months between his two F1 stints in a racing car at all, because Red Bull has continued to lack the sort of extensive old-car testing programmes that its rivals have.
Red Bull did so well to keep faith in Lawson’s talent and give him time on his way up the ladder, but that he doesn’t go into this ultimate chance better prepared is another failure of its modern driver development setup.
Lawson did however end up as the only viable solution to a sorry mess that’s wrapped up in the complex politics of the team – some it understandable and some of it less so.
This whole time there has been only one driver I would put in the Red Bull seat: Carlos Sainz Jr. That’s the level of well-rounded driver you need to be to go into that team and stand a chance of performing and delivering alongside Verstappen and it’s baffling that he wasn’t given more consideration, rather than being left to find refuge at Williams.
Much has been made of the fractions that broke out when a young Verstappen and Sainz were team-mates at Toro Rosso, now Racing Bulls. But there’s an easy solution to that for any team boss who has authority: ban both drivers’ motorsport-famous fathers from the garage and let their grown-up adult sons do their jobs in peace.
Tsunoda may well have ‘deserved’ the opportunity but discussion of his strengths and weaknesses is perhaps pointless. Having a Honda-linked driver in a Red Bull seat after their engine contract ends in 2025 is surely not desirable. Yes, Tsunoda could have been extracted from his contract, but he will always remain a product of Honda.
One reason why Japanese manufacturers support Japanese drivers is simply for national pride, and there could be no greater compliment to Honda than for them to be able to say: “A driver we found in Japan was deemed by Red Bull to be better than any driver they could find in the rest of the world.” And remember that it was Honda’s decision to withdraw from F1 (one it later reversed) that has forced Red Bull to build its own Ford-badged engines for 2026 – a source of uncertainty about the team’s future competitiveness that might even lead Verstappen to join Adrian Newey in defecting to Aston Martin.
Of course, if Red Bull had signed Sainz it would have left no room at Racing Bulls for Hadjar to step up to F1 – which is the best story in all of this.
Much to the credit of Helmut Marko and Guillaume Rocquelin, Hadjar has been a success story for the Red Bull Junior Team in its current form. As with Lawson, Hadjar has been nurtured from humble beginnings without much in the way of his own funding, and Red Bull kept faith in him even when things got tough. He was the lowest-placed of six Red Bull juniors in F2 in 2023 but the only one that remained with its backing in the series this year.
Placing him at Campos Racing didn’t look like a recipe for success on paper, but Hadjar has flourished as its team leader and has made great strides in his composure – a cause for doubt previously. That’s not to say he’s perfect, but drivers with his speed, confidence and fighting spirit are those that everyone surely wants to see in F1. And Red Bull has done the right thing to give him his chance to shine rather than bring someone in from outside, as much as Franco Colapinto deserves to be on the grid too.
Hadjar however would also have benefitted from more frequent private testing during this year, something it seems Red Bull will finally provide next year for Arvid Lindblad. Such a programme is crucial if the company wants to see a return on its investment in junior drivers and make sure they’re prepared for the opportunities that may continue to open up in their F1 line-ups in the coming years.
Peter Allen
Colapinto would have been clever catch
I am too young to have reported on Verstappen before he was in F1, but I worked as closely as you can get (without being a member of a racing team) with Lawson and Tsunoda on their way up the ladder. They’re both very mature, but like Sainz and Verstappen I do wonder if Red Bull felt they did not want the pair continuing as team-mates for 2025.
They got on very well with each other, both are fiercely competitive, and the team radio would definitely be loud during races if they stayed together. Outsiders could easily misconstrue Tsunoda’s in-car outbursts, and Lawson’s equivalents, as a fractured or unproductive relationship either on the side of the drivers or the team. But their personalities are like many other Japanese and Kiwi drivers I’ve worked with, and all parties involved have known each other for years.
When they were Euroformula team-mates in 2019, Lawson and Tsunoda truly did push each other’s boundaries, but that was a key part of the learning experience and the level of scrutiny placed on their on-track battles and working relationship off-track was less than had they been in the F1 support paddock. A teenaged me still did a lot of scrutinising, and some awful television commentary on their various clashes, near misses and great passes on each other and with rivals, and could see both were clearly future F1 stars. I think the questions some have about the pair now are ones Red Bull had answers for back then.
But the unknown was whether the opportunity for one to race in F1 would come at the expense of the other, and Red Bull’s relationship with Honda meant it was Tsunoda who was fast-tracked up the ladder. Thankfully, Lawson has now joined him on the F1 grid.
Based on the sucess of their 11 races as Racing Bulls team-mates so far, if I were team principal Laurent Mekies I would have desired line-up continuity for 2025. But if I were Red Bull Racing’s team principal Christian Horner, then promoting Lawson (despite being less prepared than Tsunoda) and making that decision early would have been my plan.
Photo: Fotospeedy
But since I’m neither, I would have placed Tsunoda alongside Verstappen for 2025 and pinched Williams’ F1-experienced junior Colapinto to partner Lawson at Racing Bulls. While Verstappen credits a champion mentality for a personality and on-track approach that has started to heckle rivals more and more, his father clearly had a big influence on that and at every stage of his racing career he has been the young driver in a team setting out to usurp older rivals through ‘raw talent’.
In the centrally-run 2014 Florida Winter Series, he was on the grid with the younger Lance Stroll but for both it was their first races in cars and Verstappen already knew how he measured up to him having crushed Stroll in karting the year before.
Therefore you have to go back to a Rotax Max Challenge Euro Trophy round in May 2013 for the last time when Verstappen had a younger team-mate (future IndyCar racer Zachary Claman DeMelo) and a different type of pressure to absorb.
Verstappen has spent enough time in the F1 paddock with Tsunoda to not be unsettled by him, even if Tsunoda could have proved to be a tougher team-mate to beat than most would anticipate. But he has a less established relationship with Lawson, certainly in a racing context, and if Red Bull Racing doesn’t make the car to beat in 2025 and leaves Verstappen looking elsewhere for when F1’s next technical era begins in 2026 then he will find it even more frustrating if Lawson handles a season being mired in the pack (and therefore being able to keep team spirits up) better than he does.
Therefore the easiest way for Red Bull to not lose Verstappen sooner than it wants is to put Tsunoda alongside him.
As for Racing Bulls, an inexperienced line-up is never ideal but Lawson already knows the car and team well and therefore the technical direction it will take in 2025, while Colapinto was superb in his nine races with Williams as the underperforming Logan Sargeant’s replacement but was never going to retain the seat for next season due to Sainz being signed. Red Bull would be/could have been very clever to tap into the fertile Argentinian fanbase and sponsorship market, and Colapinto’s proven abilities behind the wheel of an F1 car, by signing him up.
Ida Wood