Red Bull’s 2nd Driver Seat: A Poisoned Chalice

For nearly a decade, the Red Bull Racing second driver situation has stopped the team from winning several Constructors’ titles. 

Red Bull Racing started the 2025 Formula One season with Kiwi rookie Liam Lawson as their second driver. However, the 23-year-old driver never looked comfortable in the Red Bull car with his laptimes significantly slower than teammate Max Verstappen. 

While fuel loads and different race simulations can be used as excuse for Pre-season Testing, it all came crashing down during the first qualifying season of the season at Albert Park. Knocked out in Q1, Lawson’s laptime of 1:17:094 was more than a second slower to Verstappen’s time during the first qualifying session. 

The race wasn’t any different with Verstappen challenging both McLarens at the front while Lawson struggled to make any in-roads from the back of the field. In a rain-hit Australian Grand Prix, the Kiwi struggled for 46 laps before retiring from the race after hitting the barriers in Turn 2. 

The Chinese Grand Prix didn’t bear any fruit for Liam Lawson either. He qualified dead-last 20th on the grid, and could only manage a 12th place finish after Charles Leclerc, Lewis Hamilton and Pierre Gasly were disqualified from the race following post-race inspection. That was the final straw for Red Bull Racing as they demoted the 23-year-old to the Racing Bulls and brought in Japanese driver Yuki Tsunoda from Round 3 onwards. 

Tsunoda, to be fair to him, fared much better than Lawson or Sergio Pérez (mostly his final races with the team) before him, however, when the time came to deliver on that promise, the Japanese driver succumbed to the same mysterious powers. While he was comfortably two-to-three tenths behind Verstappen during the practice sessions and Q1 session, one bad sector in his final Q2 run meant he would start his home race from 15th, while Max stuck it on pole. 

Verstappen would eventually go on to win his fourth successive Japanese GP while Tsunoda finished in P12, some 58 seconds behind his teammate. 

With Max Verstappen having now raced alongside three different teammates in four races, what could be the primary reason for the second driver to keep failing when paired alongside the four-time world champion? 

The decision to swap Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda reflects terribly on Red Bull’s Formula 1 driver decision-making and strategy.

If Tsunoda fails, it’s yet another bad choice that fails to solve a longstanding problem; if he succeeds, it’s a damning indictment of its process given he was passed over a few months ago.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Red Bull’s desire to have one lead driver and a number two. The trouble is, there’s more to being a number two than being slower than the team leader. In the case of Red Bull, the gap to Verstappen has only widened in recent times and the number of points the second driver has recently picked up, hardly made any dent on the Constructors’ standings.

Regardless of whether or not Tsunoda works out, something must change. Red Bull can continue on its well-established path of picking a solid number two, but this has been done so ineptly for years now both in terms of choosing the right candidate and setting them up to thrive that anyone who’s taken the second seat has only seen themselves succumb to the expectations.

Since the moment Daniel Ricciardo shocked the world by taking a US$ 25million-a-year move to Renault rather than extending his stay for 2019, the failure has been relentless. 

Pierre Gasly had a half-season stint, before being replaced by Alex Albon, who lasted 18 months.

After the end of the 2020 season, Red Bull picked Sergio Pérez. It was the logical choice at the time given the limited options available as late in the day as the decision for 2021 was made.  

However, to be fair to him, he did a fine job as a second driver for the first three seasons, finishing fourth, third and second in the driver’s championship standings, respectively, resulting in Red Bull offering a new two-year extension deal midway through the 2023 season. However, following his last podium for Red Bull at the Chinese GP in 2024, it all went downhill for the Mexican driver. 

What started as a promising season for Pérez with four podium finishes in the first five races of the season, ended with an eighth place finish in the driver’s standings without any more trips to the podiums. 

In the end, Pérez lasted four seasons and had to be paid off at vast expense, only to be replaced by a driver who was ousted after just two events.

In an ideal world, Red Bull should be well placed when it comes to its drivers. It’s unique in having a second team where it prepares and polishes its next protégés, meaning it should always have a viable option for situations like these. Instead, every one that’s joined the fray has failed to live up to their expectations one way or the other indicating that the problem isn’t the drivers themselves but the wider organisation that’s acquiring and maintaining them.

At a time where teams like Mercedes and Ferrari are being increasingly rigorous and scientific in scouring the world for the next big thing, Red Bull’s hit-and-hope strategy is absurd.

Often the criticism is that the car is developed to suit Verstappen’s driving style and as a result many fail to cope with it. 

Since the 2018 season, the Red Bull cars have responded well to inputs but only to a driver who has the skillsets to control it without losing confidence and precision while always being the quickest, so a driver like Verstappen, just as Michael Schumacher was, is always difficult to find a team-mate for.

As such, Red Bull needs to be wary of the need to identify and develop drivers who have the level of skill needed to do well with such a car. That’s easy to say, and locating candidates who can do that who are themselves not megastars is going to be difficult. But it should at least be in mind.

The other factor is that Verstappen is a generational talent who’s very good at manipulating a difficult car to extract as much performance as possible. Give him a car with poor balance or inconsistencies and he will get plenty out of it, while making even a driver of Lawson’s quality – a proven points scorer in second-team machinery – look out of his depth.

Thus, the first thing to look at is ensuring the young driver programme sharpens up. The second one has to do with people at the top, with the selection of who to promote first to Racing Bulls then into Red Bull Racing. 

Red Bull cannot continue to leave this to chance. Their current approach has not only cost the team championships, but also an incalculable sum of money when you contemplate the cash wasted and the prize money lost to this evident shortcoming. 

Therefore, its driver development programme shouldn’t only be about finding the next superstar, but also finding the lieutenants it needs to achieve the team’s objectives.