Liam Lawson was the best Red Bull driver in Hungary and is getting better and better: in Budapest, he even kept Max Verstappen at bay
The tide seems to be turning a little for the Racing Bulls. While Isack Hadjar has been waiting for a top-10 finish for five races, his teammate Liam Lawson has found his feet after a difficult start to the season. In the same period, the New Zealander finished eighth twice and sixth once.
Lawson also scored important points for his team in Hungary with eighth place. “I’m pretty happy with the race,” he said. “The car has been really good lately, especially in race trim. Our long-run pace was very, very strong, to be honest. We seem to have the tires under control at the moment, which is really difficult this year, especially in the race.”
The only criticism from his point of view is the pure pace, which was lacking a little on Saturday: “If we had started further up the grid, we could have finished further up the grid, to be honest,” he said. “I think that’s the main takeaway from the weekend. But I’m definitely happy with the race.”
Long first stint
Lawson and teammate Hadjar started the race from ninth and tenth on the grid. At the start, Lawson initially made up one position against Max Verstappen, but he had to relinquish it again fairly quickly. The New Zealander was on medium tires and stretched out his first stint.
He only came into the pits after 40 laps to switch to hard tires, basically copying the strategy of the drivers ahead of him. “That was tough,” he said. “Especially because you had to find the right moment to stop.”
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“In the car, you feel like you just want to undercut, but there’s traffic you have to drive into – and on such a small track, that’s pretty difficult.” Lawson rejoined the track behind Carlos Sainz and Nico Hülkenberg, but quickly overtook them – Sainz on the track and Hülkenberg because he turned into the pits himself.
“I think we did well. The pace was strong, especially towards the end of the stints – we really came into our own there,” he praised.
Verstappen kept behind
Nevertheless, the position was not yet secure, because suddenly Max Verstappen was behind him, who had opted for two stops and therefore had fresher tires at the end. As a reminder, the world champion had passed the B team quite quickly in the early stages of the race. This time, however, he didn’t, which surprised Lawson.
“He was very fast at the start. He overtook me right on the first lap. But I had also seen that they were struggling quite a bit with the tires in the first stint,” he said. “I was hoping that it would happen again—that if I could keep him behind me for a few laps, he might drop back. And I think that’s more or less what happened.”
Lawson kept Verstappen at bay and was the highest-placed driver from the Red Bull squad at the finish. This must be some consolation for the 23-year-old after being demoted at Red Bull after only two races at the start of the season and also experiencing a few teething problems with the Racing Bulls.
“Absolutely. It’s been a very tough year,” he says. “It’s difficult to achieve consistently good results in Formula 1 – and things have been going really well for us lately. But of course, the second half of the season is still ahead of us. We now have to analyze what’s working well at the moment and take that with us into the next races.”
Second attempt at Red Bull?
However, even he finds it difficult to say where the upturn has come from, because nothing major has changed, as he says. “It’s more a lot of little things on the car and with myself that have helped me feel more comfortable,” says Lawson, who has finally felt at home in the car since Spielberg.
“The speed has actually been there since the start of the season – since I changed teams. But we had a lot of little problems in the first half of the season and lacked consistency. Now we’ve got it,” he praises. “But it’s hard to maintain, so we need to focus on that.”
If things continue like this, he could actually throw his hat in the ring for a second shot at Red Bull, right? “To be honest, with this year’s busy schedule, I’m not even thinking about that at the moment,” he dismisses.
“I’m just concentrating on delivering good races. We’ve had a few of those now, but three good races aren’t enough over twelve or however many there have been. We need to deliver more performances like that – and then we’ll see.”
