Liam Lawson will be driving in F1 next year.
Liam Lawson will be driving in F1 next year.
I know nothing about what's happening except that Lawson is an NZer. The article makes it sound there's been drama within the team. Can I get a crash course?
Red bull have 2 teams, 4 drivers. Their top driver Max is the world champ, his team mate is finishing at the bottom of the top 10 in the best car. It's hard for anyone to live upto max but he's been really under performing. Lawson had a couple of solid races last year as a reserve driver. Everyone expected them to dump Max's team mate during the mid season break and bring up a driver from their second team. They've stuck by him and the assumption is that it's to keep interest in his home race in Mexico coming up.
So the drama is that they have to dump someone to bring Lawson in, and they've had so many chances to dump the under performing one. The Japanese and Ozzy driver in the lower team are both great.
If they don't give Lawson a drive next year his junior driver contract says he's free to go elsewhere. But F1 is littered with great drivers who don't get a chance for commercial reasons, and crappy drivers who hang around also for commercial reasons.
There's also a second level of drama within the Red Bull team.
It's divided into an 'old' guard, with Marko in the lead and the 'new' guard formed by an investment group from Thailand headed by Yoovidhya. These two have been having a power struggle since Mateschitz died. This has lead to the dirt on Horner coming out, Newey leaving the team and Jos Verstappen publicly airing the dirty laundry and stirring the pot as he does.
Marko hates Perez, because he's an old racist bastard who hates everybody with a bit of a skin color. So he wants him gone, but for some reason the other faction within the teams want to retain Perez. I'm not sure why, because he has been under performing, but the Thais keep everything to themselves so we don't know.
Ah right, so this isn't an announcement that he's made the team, it's an announcement to say don't worry, we will get him on the track before the contract expires?
The guy looks super young, I think I saw he's about 22, that Max guy is 26? Have formula 1 drivers always been this young? I must be getting old.