When Liam Lawson replaced the injured Daniel Ricciardo last year, he impressed everyone with his raw pace and performance during a couple of races before the return of Ricciardo.
But how did he get the first drive? He improved on George Russell’s PowerPoint presentation and has now revealed Helmut Marko and Christian Horner’s tactics to attract talent.
A good bunch of the current generation of F1 drivers on the grid started their careers with the Red Bull family.
Max Verstappen, Pierre Gasly, Carlos Sainz, Alex Albon, and Yuki Tsunoda are all Red Bull prodigies and are regarded highly in the F1 community. Even Daniel Ricciardo began his with Red Bull and was replaced by the newest Red Bull family driver, Liam Lawson, when he got injured.
Liam Lawson has now come out to explain how he got the drive and replaced Ricciardo rather than the team going for an experienced driver elsewhere.
George Russell impressed Toto Wolff with his presentation when he was 15 years old, and that convinced Wolff to give the Brit a Mercedes contract and eventually become a Mercedes driver. However, Lawson bettered it to get the AlphaTauri drive last year.
Lawson was asked by the Red Flag podcast host, “It’s so fascinating to me the whole selling yourself, like the George Russell ppt. The whole culture of that. Is that something that you had to learn? Is that a part of a skillset?”
His response was: “It is definitely different. It is something that you first pick up as a junior. Especially in Red Bull, you’re dealing directly with Helmut Marko and Christian Horner. You’re dealing directly with the top guys who are calling the shots.”
He explained how a direct relationship with Helmut Marko is attractive to the younger drivers and added “That’s what’s cool about the program is you don’t deal with other people and then as you get higher up, you start to then talk to these guys.
“From the start, Helmut Marko calls you the very first time that you sign the contract and your direct person of contact is him. You spend years talking to him, but most of these conversations are just one sided, because you’re so scared.”
He then continued to elaborate on how, when Ricciardo got injured, he recalled everything he had learned from the conversations with Marko and the Red Bull simulator and blabbered it in front of the Red Bull Taskmaster.
He then suggested how that blabbering was the reason why he got the seat rather than an experienced driver, bettering Russell’s Powerpoint story.
However, if Red Bull wants to keep Lawson in the family, they need to provide him with a seat for next year as a secret clause in his contract has been revealed.
Questions over Daniel Ricciardo’s seat have been asked, as the Australian isn’t particularly impressing anyone with his performances. The P4 in the Miami Sprint caught the attention, but the race pace was again subpar.
At the same time, Teammate Yuki Taunoda has consistently been scoring points. Amid all this, it is revealed that Red Bull needs to provide Lawson a seat for 2025, or else he has the option to move to a rival. Red Bull wouldn’t want talent like Lawson to go, and Ricciardo seems the most likely option to give way.
Joe Saward in his blog revealed, “The thing about Lawson is that his Red Bull contract stipulates that he must be given a race drive in 2025 or he can walk away to a rival team. Some other teams are interested, so Red Bull must decide what to do and logic suggests that they might as well sign him for next year and start training him up straight away, hoping that he will score more than the two current drivers”
