17/07/2025 20:00
Liam Lawson wants his Racing Bulls team to be able to hit the
ground running on F1 weekends to repeat his Austria performance.
After a mixed return to the team following demotion from Red Bull,
Lawson's best performance of the season came in round 11 in
Austria, where he qualified and finished in sixth place. This was
on the unfancied one-stop strategy, with the New Zealander being
the strongest of Red Bull's four drivers across the weekend, even
out-qualifying Max Verstappen, something he did not achieve at Red
Bull. Racing Bulls, under new boss Alan Permane after Laurent
Mekies' promotion to replace the sacked Christian Horner at Red
Bull, finds itself seventh in the constructors' standings at the
halfway stage on 36 points. Just 22 points separate Stake in sixth
from Alpine in 10th, with Stake rocketing up from ninth to sixth
after Nico Hulkenberg's 15 points for third at Silverstone. Given
how close the performance is in the midfield, Lawson feels his team
need to be able to deliver immediately on grand prix weekends from
free practice 1. "We will analyse everything and exactly why it all
clicked together [in Austria], and basically try to take that into
every weekend," Lawson told media when asked by RacingNews365 how
he could build on his result at the Red Bull Ring. "Every track is
different, so that is one thing we have to do the same every
weekend, which is to continue to develop, and with how close the
margins are, there is no time to sit on what you have. "If you have
a good session, if you start FP1 in a really strong position, it
will give you no guarantee for the weekend because everybody is
chasing every session. "At the same time, because the margins are
so close, it is very important that the work you do before the
weekend starts with a good platform and starts with the car in a
good place. "Then it is much easier to build from that, and if you
start way off, it obviously makes it a lot more difficult to get
the car in a good place."
