It's really not fair to Liam.

A higher ceiling? So much for that. There is a couple of things that you've got to know about the New Zealand sportsman's psyche. The first is that we will defend our sportspeople until the ends of the earth. We'll brand them as heroes, gods even. We'll have them advertise canned mush, and we'll call them the best in the world even if they've never played a game in their life. But the moment they begin to struggle, we'll drop them like a DC-10. It's called Claw Poppy Syndrome, and it is our biggest failing. Among other things. I've made it no secret about how much I rated Liam Lawson, thought of him as New Zealand's best prospect for a Formula One driver since, well, it has been a long time since we last had one. Which is why this was so tantalising. Sure, the prospect of facing down the Flying Dutchman as a teammate seemed daunting, but as a sporting nation, we have our heads jammed so far up our own arse that we can see past stuff like that. But now that it's all already over, I guess it's time for us as a nation to pull our party trick and cut bait with Liam Lawson. Right? Well, yes and no, because a lot of stuff has led up to this point, and it seems that we always tend to forget. 2018 was the bestest time in the world for Red Bull Racing. But, well, maybe not quite. Mercedes were the king of the hill at that time, but the team at Milton Keynes could still hold an answer for them, from time to time at least, thanks to the pencil of Adrian Newey, as well as their two fantastic drivers at the helm. Obviously, they had Max Verstappen, still a little rough around the edges, but they can make it work. They went through hell and creation for this guy, and they were going to see it through to the bitter end. But the other marquee driver that they had over the past few seasons, one that had earned a lot of bread for them, was Daniel Ricciardo. Established, fast, cool, funny, Australian, well, no one's perfect. Though in instances like Monaco that year, you'd swear that he was. Just different gravy. But despite being the commodity that he was for that team, whether commercially or on the racetrack, Danny Big Dick McRick laid the smackdown on Red Bull that year by announcing that for 2019, he would be vanmoosing to Renault. Part of it was down to him wanting to build his own legacy as another team, but you also did get the feeling that this wasn't part to him losing his status within that team to Max. As throughout 2018, Max was becoming more polished as the season went on. This left a vacancy at the Red Bull team for 2019. I'm sure if Red Bull could clone, they would have two Max Verstappens in that team. But that technology wasn't quite available at that time. So they instead opted for Pierre Gasly. Gasly had shown his stuff in the Toro Rosso, and was touted as the wave of the future. But it wouldn't work out. By the midway point of the season, barely 12 races into his tenure, they threw him back down to Minardi, and swapped him with Alexander Albon. It was a bad drowning for Gazza, but that happens sometimes in Formula 1. They ran with Albon for the better part of a year and a half before cutting him loose as well. And in 2021, they would take on board an outsider in the form of Sergio Perez. A worthwhile signing, and it was deserving, but it did kinda tell how desperate Red Bull were at the time. Their last two junior drivers didn't work, so best look outside of their wheelhouse here. For the better part of a couple of years, Checo did pretty much look like the guy that Red Bull finally needed. But gradually, things started to slide, and throughout the entirety of 2024, his seat was in constant jeopardy. Finally, they would get rid of him at the end of the season, and replace him with, at long last, one of their juniors, Liam Lawson. And right off the bat, it was met with firm resistance from a lot of people looking in from the outside. A lot of fans hated it, and people around the paddock were puzzled. Lawson only had 11 races under his belt in the two-quarter stints that he had at V-Cup, and both were... fine, I guess? Under the circumstances and everything, they were perfectly acceptable. But on paper, he was comprehensively beaten by teammate, Yuki Tsunoda. It was generally thought that Yuki-san was much more prepared for that Red Bull seat than Liam was. But Red Bull tried to claim that after analysing everything, that Liam was the better option, and that he had a higher ceiling, and blah blah blah blah blah. Yuki therefore was looked over for reasons that were only really known to them, despite his adamance that he wanted that seat, and that it was more suited to his driving style. And even Honda weighing in couldn't get them to budge toward Yuki, and so the commitment was made. The hat was over the wall. That 2025 Red Bull seat was Liam's. Now, no one was under any illusion about what Liam was going up against when heading into that seat. I mean, yeah. I did make the not-at-all-badly-aged proclamation that he would put the damn thing on the front row in Melbourne, and that he would win a race at some stage during the season. But there was mate in the thought that, at some stage, this curse bestowed upon the second Red Bull seat surely had to end, right? Right? Pre-season testing didn't really show us too much of anything. Nobody really knew where anybody was, but there was definitely nothing that caused any alarm. Well, apart from the spin, but almost all of us have an account on X, so we can't be throwing glass and stone houses now, can't we? The Red Bull did look a bit of a bastard to drive, but as Liam said before the season started, in Formula 1, you have got to adapt. You see, that's the thing about saying things. They come back to bite ya. Red Bull also insisted that they would give Liam the time to learn, grow, and develop to morph into the driver that they all believed that he was, and that would come in handy in the first round of Melbourne as it was a track that, save for a couple of demo laps in a V8 supercar, he had never driven at before. But as any Australasian kid could tell you, you do live on this track on video games growing up, so he sure as hell knew which way the track went, that this was Turn 1, this was Turn 6, and this was the SS Complex where you run over ducks. Immediately that weekend, it was evident that Red Bull was struggling with the pace of the car, but one was struggling more than the other. In FP1, Liam was struggling down in 16th, before improving on that in FP2 with a 17th placing. In FP3, he was sidelined for almost the entire session owing to a car problem when the rat poison finally filtered through the fuel lines and munted his engine. That meant that he went into qualifying naked, and culminated in him qualifying in 18th place, only ahead of Esteban Ocon in the Snails Low Huss, and Oli the Bear Bearman, who didn't even set a lap time at all. One Red Bull at the front, one Red Bull at the back. The more things change, the more they stay the same. This was incredibly alarming, and it appeared that, after dumping Checo out of the sport in borderline acrimonious circumstances, we just got the same old crap that we did before. He started the race from the pit lane, and for a while, he struggled to get past Ocon in the damn conditions. But even when he did get past, he couldn't seem to rein in the Saubers of Nico Hülkenberg and Gabi Bortoletto. If you can't catch up to the born-again Brinaldi, it's no shame, because that dude has been really good. But you're in a Red Bull, and he's in a Sauber. All the while, your teammate is up the front and contending for at least a podium, and potentially a win, if Lando Norris decided to be himself. The stark contrast at play was deeply concerning, and this all came to a head when, in the latter half of the race, Liam, or the Red Bull Pitbull for that matter, made the novel mistake of attempting to drive slick tyres in a lake. Liam gently spun off the track and smashed his gearbox into the wall as an homage to Isaac Hadjar. If there was any silver lining to this momentous disaster, it was that Liam's fastest lap But they don't dish points out for this, and nor do they for turning your gearbox into dust. Out of 10, this weekend could be rated as a no. But of course, he had never driven around here before, so you could use that as some kind of excuse, I guess. However, the next round was in Shanghai, and he hadn't driven around here before, neither. The issue of inexperience was compounded by the fact that this was a sprint weekend, which on its own I got beef with, but one rant at a time here, folks. Sprint qualifying came about, and Liam was last. Stone. Dead. Last. Adding to New Zealand's long laundry list of head-hanging moments in sport. In the sprint itself, he did climb up the pack with some daring moves, and honestly, it was encouraging to see. But you would expect that, given the car he was in. It may not have been the best car, but surely it's better than these other ones, right? But after the gimmick race was over, the real one began. Qualifying came about. Time for redemption for Liam. Q1 came to a close, and last again. I'm dying over here. Thanks to this, Red Bull opted to start Liam from the pit lane again, and once he got out and joined the race, he progressed up the field at the rate of which hairs grow on a chimp's scrotum. He often found himself battling to either get ahead or get away from Jack Doohan in the Alpine. He would ultimately come home in 16th place on the road, behind the Toro Rosso of Hadjar, who he could not reign in in those last few laps, despite being markedly faster than Doohan, who was ultimately penalised for extending the Turn 14 hairpin by about 4.5 prefectures. Liam's 16th place became 12th, after Doohan's penalty, Gasly's disqualification, and Ferrari being Ferrari. It's also worth noting that, while he did finish ahead of Yuki, that came with a mighty fine asterisk. Firstly, both the Alpha Tauris were handicapped due to a bungled strategic core, and then later on, Yuki's front wing appeared to yeet itself out of existence, forcing him to pit, and throwing him down the pack. But nobody was fooled. See, while the racing bull was looking very, very good in these first couple of races, Yuki was definitely driving as if he had a point to prove. In other words, he was driving as he largely was throughout the last year and a bit. The Yuki of old definitely had some problems, but these were largely gone, and what we have now is the dude who was in the form of his life, and someone who should have been put into that second red bull seat from the start. Instead, we had Liam, drowning like an Aussie Prime Minister off for a cold swim. Sure, he was inexperienced with the tracks, but lest we forget, there were five other rookies on that grid, and none of them struggled as much as he did. Due to this extraordinarily bad showing, the dysphoria around the motor racing world was quite extreme. People questioning what the hell Red Bull were doing, that they fired Checo for this? And New Zealand media were pretty quick to note all of this, and dispatched one of their two tactics, either full copium, or a full-on Cena-esque heel turn. Although Liam himself is making no excuses, saying that his performances were just not good enough, and that while he doesn't have enough time to really grow, that's just the reality of Formula 1, and that issue of time is very, very real. Already there are talks of him being dropped after just two rounds in lieu of Yuki, with Liam being dumped back to Manatee, and even the prospect that he would be dumped completely, and that the racing bulls seat would be taken up by contract journeyman, Franco Colopinto, which to be honest, I might kinda prefer. But even though it's now pretty much now officially confirmed, you have gotta wonder whether Red Bull should've given Liam one last chance at the third round in Japan, because he does have experience around Suzuka in a Formula 1 car, and had actually beaten Yuki that day as a teammate in 2023. It's a circuit that he knows, and thus the catch-up game would not be as prominent. But would that be enough? His lack of pace, especially in qualifying, has largely been down to the lack of confidence in getting his car to behave like a car. Driving conservatively to tone down the snaps is killing his runs, and it is apparent that his inability to understand the nuances of the car is why the gap between he and the Flying Dutchman is so vast. And being at a familiar track is not going to totally extinguish that. But this theme of a driver struggling to adapt to a Red Bull is not a new thing. This has been going on for years now. Back in 2019, Pierre Gasly was drafted in to fill the void left by Daniel Ricciardo. Despite coming in with high praise from his Toro Rosso stint, Gasly almost immediately drowned. To the point where in Hungary, he was lapped by Max with no mitigating circumstances. And so, being the tight ship that they is, he was promptly dumped after 12 races, and in came Alex Albon, who despite some glimpses of promise early on, and a couple of podiums, also struggled badly in that seat. And with Checo having the season of his life at Team Stroll in 2020, Albon was vamoosed, and Checo was signed for 2021. And this did appear to be a good signing at first, but once the Red Bull began to lose The differences in lap time between the two drivers was becoming too much, and even a contract extension was not enough for Checo to regain his mojo, and thus was dumped at the end of the year. In came Liam Lawson, and it appears that history is just repeating itself. It's been 7 seasons now, and nothing is changing. We know how good Gasly is. We know how good Albon is. We know how good Checo was. Yet that damn second Red Bull seat seemed to wipe all of our memories, and the stints there almost obliterated all of their careers. They all struggled with a car that, while not built around Max, is clearly something that only really he can drive, and a lot of the time, even he doesn't like it. You build a car to be as fast as it can go, but there is a tolerance level to it from the drivers. And if Max Verstappen is saying that your car isn't great, it's not freaking great. You've got a car problem Red Bull, to go along with your severe, severe driver mismanagement problem. Now, I'm not too sure who's been in charge of the decisions at that team, but a large influence has been from Dr. Helmut Marko, who is living, breathing proof that you don't need any discernible talent to keep a job that you're badly out of your depth in. Take away his coup of signing Max in 2014 thanks to promising him a Formula 1 seat, and what you're left with is a complete mess of a driver development team. There has been some good talent come through, yes, but how and why he selects his drivers is beyond me. There's talk of him wanting Colopinto, despite saying that his Junior Formula results were not that great. But then again, he didn't have the best teams, didn't he? YOU DENSE, MELTED OLD GOAT. Did you not reckon that when he beat your drivers in a lesser team in a summer series five years ago when he was living on budget ramen and Steven Seagal movies? Most F1 YouTubers out there have deeper wheel knowledge than this guy, and do you realise how low that bar is? And besides, as much as I rate him, why even factor in Colopinto here? Don't you already have Arvid Lindblad? You know, a driver that you ask for special dispensation for his super license for? This whole debacle reeks of mismanagement, and it has destroyed careers. Nick DeVries was brought in for 2023 for AlphaTauri, based off of one super sub race, and ended up getting dumped after 10 races. And likely, Marco's mind was made up well before that even. You then brought back Ricciardo, only to almost immediately lose faith in the guy. If you actually had a brain, even if only a small one which beats whatever it is in that hollow skull of yours, you would have put either Liam Lawson or Ayuma Iwasa in that second AlphaTauri seat for 2023. You would have then had two seasons of comparable results against Yuki, to discern who would have been the best option to succeed Checo in 2025. And instead, you took a gamble on someone you looked over in 2023, while the two other drivers that you were so convinced were gonna be great, you just cast aside almost immediately. Merriam-Webster has just updated their dictionary. You look up fraud, and you'll just see a picture of this guy. So, Yuki has now been granted that red bull seat, all in front of his home crowd, and genuinely, about freaking time. And it's kinda remarkable, that after all the pissing around that was done toward the end of last season, we ended up with a driver lineup that we should have had in the first place, after almost destroying the careers of a driver that you guys had more faith in. But while this has been a long time coming, quite simply, this has to work. And not just for one session, or one round. This has to work on a consistent basis. Because if Yuki drowns, what exactly are the alternatives for Red Bull? You go for Hadjar? You go for Limblad? Colopinto? Exactly how many careers do you want to ruin in vain, chasing your tail? Yuki is gonna have to break the trend set down by four other drivers that we all knew could drive before they got this poison chalice. And the latest is perhaps the most egregious. Because this is happening two races in to Liam Lawson's tenure. He has had no grace period. And let's not start pretending that he couldn't drive, or that he's forgotten to. I've already talked about what he's done in the past, especially up against Albon and Yuki when they were teammates. So I'll save y'all the propaganda gospel. But let us not also forget what the likes of Gasly, Albon, and Checo did before and after they were in that seat themselves. Either way, the disaster of Liam Lawson definitely wasn't solely down to Red Bull's equivalent of the curse of the Bambino. As he himself would admit, he just wasn't good enough. A humility and self-reflection that quite a few drivers could learn from. But I still have faith in the guy that many tragics are already referring to. Real imaginative, guys. Well done. What next? We're gonna start calling him Law Javier? Humor on this platform really has tanked, hasn't it? But you know, that Minardi looks pretty good so far, and much more manageable than the Red Bullers. I mean, I don't know, going back there could not only help him rediscover his form, as well as the cure for cancer, but could also save his career as a total dropping as widely rumoured with regards to Franco Colopinto could have put an end to it all. And please, don't let the hate watch blind y'all. Maybe the demotion to Minardi will be a blessing in disguise. Maybe Yuki will buck the trend and actually push the Flying Dutchman. Maybe Red Bull will grow some sense, and issue Marco with a one-way bus ticket to **** off Phil. Whatever the future holds for all involved, I just hope and pray that we can all collectively behave like grown, civil adults. Now if you'll excuse me. I used to look upon myself as rational and strong And love was just a word in silly song But from that cursed day when you crossed my way All my confidence was