lawson gets the red bull seat back (thanks to a punching bag)
isack hadjar broke his wrist over the summer break, so liam lawson gets a second go at red bull, at the last ever dutch GP.
the summer break is over, and red bull came back from it one driver short. isack hadjar fractured his wrist during the shutdown, and according to sky’s craig slater he did it punching a heavy bag in the gym. red bull’s statement on wednesday only said “wrist injury”, which is what i would say too if i had lost a fight to a bag of sand.
so for this weekend’s dutch GP, liam lawson is back in the seat that chewed him up last year. yuki tsunoda, the reserve, takes lawson’s car at racing bulls next to arvid lindblad.
a quick history lesson. lawson started 2025 as max verstappen’s teammate and lasted two rounds. he qualified 18th in australia and crashed, qualified last for both the sprint and the race in china, and by japan the seat was tsunoda’s. tsunoda then lost that same seat to hadjar for this year. now hadjar is hurt, lawson has the red bull and tsunoda has lawson’s car. you could not make this driver programme up.
the funny part is where it is happening. lawson’s F1 debut was at zandvoort in 2023, when daniel ricciardo broke his hand in practice and alphatauri put him in for the rest of the weekend. three years later he is at zandvoort again, getting a drive because somebody else broke something.
does he deserve it? on this year’s form, yes. he is ninth in the standings on 43 points, 20 clear of lindblad, and he has been the best of the midfield all season. i have been hard on lawson before (he does love an incident that is entirely his own fault), but the speed has never been the question.
the problem is the timing. zandvoort is a sprint weekend for the first time, so he gets one hour of practice in the RB22 before sprint qualifying on friday. one hour, in a car that even verstappen has only dragged to sixth in the championship. max has four podiums and no wins after eleven rounds, and red bull is fourth in the constructors. lawson already knows what happens to people who are slow next to max.
and hadjar was not slow. he is eighth, he had scored in seven races in a row, and he was quietly doing the job that seat has ruined for everyone since sergio perez. punching a sandbag in august is a strange way to hand that momentum to someone else.
then there is the bigger picture. this is the last dutch GP, because the organisers chose not to extend past 2026. so max’s home race goes out with its first ever sprint and with max sixth in the standings. the orange army deserves a better goodbye than that, and i would love to see him give them one last win. i just don’t think that car has it in it.
prediction: lawson scores points on sunday, tsunoda outqualifies lindblad because of course he does, and verstappen gets a podium out of pure stubbornness. the race is at 16:00 here in riyadh. see you after it.