Mark Hughes: Groundhog Day or redemption? Lawson's audition hinges on 0.3sec

Liam Lawson’s roller-coaster F1 career has taken another twist this weekend with his call-up to the senior team at Zandvoort to replace the injured Isack Hadjar. After just two races as Max Verstappen’s team-mate in the Red Bull, he was demoted back to the junior Racing Bulls team at the beginning of last year. Alongside the rookie Hadjar there, he came off second-best. He hung onto the seat for this year because there was no-one in the junior squad deemed F1-ready, but once Red Bull’s F2 driver Nikola Tsolov hit form (he currently leads F2) it seemed likely Lawson would be nudged aside and out of F1 for ‘27.

But far from buckling under the pressure, he has unerringly delivered great results. To his characteristic racy feistiness, he added great consistency. Always a scrapper, he’s had some ding-dong battles with rookie team-mate Arvid Lindblad, but the judgement has been good on both sides, and it’s not led to any ill-feeling. He’s doing a great job and harvesting points as a matter of course. But…

Let’s just recap on the background to his two-race stint with the team at the beginning of last year. He’d got a day-and-a-half pre-season testing at Bahrain, then straight into the Australian Grand Prix where in FP3 he had a PU problem which prevented him doing his soft tyre preparation runs. He went into qualifying having not driven on the soft tyre and in trying to compensate, pushed too hard and ended his session in the gravel trap.

Onto China, a circuit totally new to him and on a sprint weekend with just one practice session, he was again scrappy and out in Q1, starting at the back in both sprint and GP qualifying. It was an exercise in under-preparation and not an accurate barometer of his real level. But that was it, demoted back to the junior team thereafter.

Now that Hadjar’s wrist injury has given Lawson another opportunity with the big team, he has a chance to give the world a better reading of that level, even if it does end up being a one-race stand-in as Hadjar recovers.

The RB22 is not as well balanced as the Racing Bulls car he’s been driving this season, but it’s faster, grippier. It’s very often been this way over the years when comparing the cars of the junior and senior Red Bull teams, giving some the erroneous impression that the junior car is actually faster and it’s only Verstappen making it not seem so. The reality is that the senior team has always produced a faster car, but that it’s typically been a more demanding drive. Its limits are higher but more difficult to access.

Hadjar has confirmed as much this year. If we compare his average qualifying pace to that of whatever the faster Racing Bulls has been at each race (so losing us the Verstappen factor) Hadjar has averaged over 0.6sec quicker (and 0.3sec slower than Verstappen).

Having even qualified ahead of Max on a couple of occasions, Hadjar has gone a long way to busting the myth about the second Red Bull seat being cursed. As such, is he performing to a higher level than either of the junior cars, Lawson and Lindblad? Last year, as a rookie at Racing Bulls, Hadjar was faster than the more experienced Lawson (by 0.16sec as a percentage-corrected average and 17-3 in the head-to-head). Sure, Lawson’s been putting together a great ’26 season, but here’s the crucial question: would Hadjar have done even better in that car? Is Lawson’s impressive-looking ’26 season just that of a good, solid professional flattered into looking more than that by a sweet-handling car and a rookie team-mate?