Liam Lawson, Red Bull off pace in Formula 1 Melbourne practice

By Alex Powell

Time will tell how valuable Liam Lawson’s first full day of Formula One practice with Red Bull will be. But if lap times are anything to go by, this could be a difficult weekend for the Kiwi at the season-opening Melbourne Grand Prix.

Preparing for his full debut with Red Bull’s senior team after stepping up from junior side Racing Bulls, Lawson at the very least managed 50 laps in the new RB21 car, on a track he’s never driven on before in a single seater.

McLaren’s Lando Norris was fastest in the first practice, with a best time of 1m 17.252s, while Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was quickest in the second, managing 1m 16.439s. In both instances, Lawson finished 1.203s behind Norris, and 1.201s back from Leclerc.

However, after being tasked by Red Bull’s Dr Helmut Marko to be within 0.3s per lap of teammate - world champion - Max Verstappen, Lawson was 0.759s back in the first practice session, and 0.577 back in the second, finishing with the 16th and 17th fastest times respectively.

“[I’m] comfortable, just too slow,” Lawson said after the second session. “We obviously have a lot of work to do overnight.

“Day one, on a new track, we probably have some work to do, but not this much. We’ll work on it overnight, and try to improve tomorrow.

“We know how to fix it... We’ll work on it.”

The gap between the two is understandable, considering the RB21 is less forgiving than the VCARB01 Lawson drove with Racing Bulls last year, and the AT04 he drove for AlphaTauri in 2023.

What’s more, even as world champion, Verstappen still finished the second session with the seventh-fastest time, and behind both Racing Bulls drivers as Yuki Tsunoda was fourth, and Isack Hadjar sixth.

Despite beating Tsunoda to the Red Bull seat alongside Verstappen to end 2024, Lawson was also 0.856s back from his former Racing Bulls teammate. Across both sessions, Lawson was the slowest of the four Red Bull-affiliated cars.

Practice sessions see teams work on a number of different things, with tyres, fuel loads and aerodynamic configurations used to collect data before the Grand Prix’s qualifying session. The fact both Racing Bulls cars topped their senior counterparts is all the evidence of that.

Lawson can also take solace from his improvement from the first session into the second, going 0.815s quicker. The 23-year-old will get another practice session on Saturday, before qualifying for Sunday’s Grand Prix.

Earlier, in his first taste of driving the Albert Park Circuit, the size of Lawson’s challenge in getting to speed with the RB21 was made evident when the Kiwi clipped the wall at turn nine, before the second DRS zone.

After eight laps, and still coming to grips with his car, Lawson closed the gap between himself and Verstappen to just over half a second, before the first of the two red flags, when Alpine’s Jack Doohan went wide, and sprayed gravel over the track with just over 40 minutes to go.

Once the session resumed, the threat of the gravel trap for the weekend was made all the more clear when McLaren’s Oscar Piastri - the local favourite - also found himself in trouble after leaving the track.

Following the resumption, after pitting for soft tyres, Verstappen set the fastest time of the first session, more than a second clear of Lawson’s best effort.

However, after spending close to 20 minutes in the pits with a damaged floor, Lawson emerged on the soft tyres, only to see another red flag when Haas’ Oliver Bearman hit the wall, and lost his front wing.

That incident also came at turn nine, which troubled drivers in the earlier Formula Three and Formula Two sessions as well.

Despite managing to post his fastest lap in the final minutes, Lawson was still unable to challenge the top 10, as Mercedes’ George Russell spun to bring about a yellow flag as the final act of the opening session.

This article was first published on nzherald.co.nz and is republished here with permission