MPH: Lawson's Zandvoort showing leaves Red Bull with tough questions

Liam Lawson was in a familiar situation in the Zandvoort sprint race, immersed in a race-long dice with Arvid Lindblad, just as he has been for much of the season to date. Familiar situation but different environment – for Lawson, of course, wasn’t Lindblad’s team-mate here but subbing in at the senior Red Bull team.

On the surface it seemed a slightly humiliating situation. Well behind team-mate Max Verstappen in sprint qualifying and still only in the same part of the upper midfield of the race as when in the junior team car. What’s more, he was beaten by Lindblad in both sprint qualifying and the race.

We outlined here on Friday just what challenges for Lawson came with this opportunity. It’s not just that he was in an unfamiliar car – though at least its PU and associated systems would be the same – with only one practice session before sprint qualifying, but it was in how its nature was so different to that of the Racing Bulls. It’s a faster car with significantly more aerodynamic load, but a more difficult drive, trickier to balance.

So when the track grip or the wind changes, there’s a bigger shift in the car’s traits than in the Racing Bulls, which has a nice, wide balance window. If you’re familiar with that, it’s manageable and it will still be a faster car than the Racing Bulls. But if you’re not, then it can cost you a lot of lap time and risk leaving you no faster – or even slightly slower – than you would have been in the junior car. Which is exactly what happened to Lawson in sprint qualifying.

In SQ1, he was quick; P6 and actually over 0.1sec quicker than Verstappen. But into SQ2 the headwind into Tarzan increased, there was more grip available through there than he was familiar with and on a fast-improving surface went only 0.284sec faster than on the slower track of SQ1, in contrast to a typical improvement of between 0.8-1.1sec. It wasn’t quite enough to get him into SQ3, was 0.365sec off Verstappen and, gallingly, slower than Lindblad too.

Let’s look in a little more detail how Verstappen and Lawson each reacted to the improved grip into Tarzan between SQ1 and SQ2. On the latter lap, Verstappen stands on the brakes at exactly the same place as before but he instantly senses the greater grip, releases the pedal pressure for a moment and lets the car roll against the engine braking and only then stands harder on the brakes. So 20 metres or so into the braking zone, where he was doing 237km/h on the first run, this time he’s doing 270km/h. It’s a very big grip increase and he accesses it all almost immediately. He’s also able to run through the gears harder on the exit, not needing to short-shift to contain the wheelspin. By the time he’s exited Tarzan, he’s already 0.26sec faster than before.

Through Turn 7, a quick right hander, even though he’s turning the car through a crosswind which becomes a tailwind, by now he’s very familiar with the greater surface grip of the track and he’s actually earlier on the throttle than before, picking up another couple of tenths. He’s able to stay full on the gas way longer into Turn 8, so enters that corner a full 21km/h faster, taking the improvement up to over 0.5sec. He’s braking no later, sometimes slightly earlier, but he’s arriving faster, the car will be doing less dipping and diving and its aero platform working better. By the time he’s stayed later on the throttle into Turn 13 for the run onto the final turn banking, he’s thick end of 0.8sec faster than before.

Looking at the equivalent Lawson comparison between the two runs, the first thing of note is that he hasn’t reached the same terminal speed as before, at 312km/h rather than 316. Which is because he’s entered the straight slower, perhaps unsettled by the balance change as the tailwind becomes a headwind through the T13/final turn transition and although he stands on the brakes for Tarzan later than before, it’s from a lower speed and he’s still actually slower into the turn than first time and over 0.1s down already. But he’s at least able to be earlier on the gas and regain most of the time lost. But compared to Verstappen, he’s already a quarter-second down and the lap’s barely started.

Straight away, we know this lap is far adrift of what he can achieve. He’s been thrown off by something unfamiliar and doesn’t have the overriding confidence to push on regardless. Probably the Racing Bulls in the same situation would have reacted more benignly to the balance change of the different wind, with a less sudden transition at the crossover from tail to headwind, partly because of its lower grip level. The extra downforce the bigger teams find from simulation and tunnel is real but it makes the car trickier on the edge. The slower cars do tend to be easier drives. Through Turn 10, the next headwind corner, he’s able to take full advantage and even into Turn 13, his bogey corner at the beginning of the lap, he’s far more confident this time. But although he’s improved over the lap, the others have improved far more. Quite aside from the iffy beginning to the lap, he’s not fully exploited all the greater grip.

“I don’t really know what happened in SQ2,” he reported later. “We just didn’t seem to make the same jump that everyone else did.”

The Red Bull had proved typically difficult to balance on this weekend and Verstappen did his usual adaptation and set-up tweaks and although he was barely any quicker than Lindblad in SQ2, he found a further 0.8sec in SQ3 while Lindblad found almost nothing, having reached the car’s lower plateau earlier.

Awkwardly behind Lindblad, things were looking less than great for Lawson at this point. But the upside of the sprint format was he got another opportunity with GP qualifying and this time it went much better. He made it through to Q3, where his eighth-fastest time was only 0.115sec slower than Verstappen. Not quite as committed under braking into Tarzan or the Turn 11-12 chicane, but slightly faster through the fast momentum of Turns 7-8, it was everything that could have been asked of him in this situation and it exorcised those two disastrous races with the team at the beginning of last year.

He went side-by-side with Verstappen through Turn 3 on the first lap of the race in typical gung-ho style before tucking back in. He watched Verstappen crash in front of him at the end of that lap and went on to put the car where it deserved to be at the flag – behind the top three teams but way ahead of the rest.