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‘I know they wanted to give me a shot at some point’
Lawson did a good enough job in those tests, which included runs in both old-spec Red Bull and RB machinery to convince Red Bull he had the potential to deliver not only in the RB but also the Red Bull should they decide to move on from Sergio Perez.
With that in mind, they needed to get him the car sooner rather than later, so during the Azerbaijan weekend, they told Lawson the news he had been hoping – and needing – to hear.
“Baku was the point I was told,” he says. “Things change very quickly during the year. There were points when things were looking good and points when it wasn’t looking so good. I always knew the incentive was to give me a shot, and I’ve known that since last year, Christian [Horner, Red Bull boss] told me that personally.
“I know they wanted to give me a shot at some point – and I trusted that as well. But it’s hard, after that amount of time, to be patient. As much as I believed it, it was getting quite difficult.
“It was leaning towards this direction – not exactly where I was going to go, but that I was going to get a seat somewhere – that was the direction it was heading in for the last few weeks leading into Singapore and it was Baku when they gave me the decision.”
Red Bull are hard taskmasters. They’ve never been afraid to drop or demote drivers mid-season – such as Nyck de Vries, Daniel Kyvat, Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon and Ricciardo to name a few – or entirely from the programme. Even if you perform to their desired level, there still needs to be a seat available to move into.
When Lawson was overlooked for a full-time seat this year, despite a strong showing as a super sub, and then watched as each race ticked by this year without him getting the nod to replace one of Red Bull’s stable of four race drivers, did he start to think it was never going to happen for him?