Liam Lawson, pictured in Racing Bulls colours earlier this season, returns to the Red Bull RB22 for a second consecutive weekend at Monza. Photo: Yu Chu Chin, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Friday practice at the Circuito de Madring didn’t just produce a new benchmark lap for a track that didn’t exist a year ago. It quietly answered a question nobody had bothered to ask out loud: what happens when a driver gets handed a car he doesn’t own and a circuit nobody has ever raced, in the same ninety minutes?
Liam Lawson ended FP2 tenth, three tenths off pace-setter Kimi Antonelli and, more tellingly, two places behind Yuki Tsunoda’s Racing Bulls. The gap matters less as a number than as a signal. Tsunoda has had a rough season by his own standards, but he was driving a car tuned around his own inputs at a track he’d also never seen. Lawson was driving someone else’s car at a track he’d also never seen. Only one of those problems fixes itself with more laps.
This is Lawson’s third straight weekend standing in for Isack Hadjar, who is still recovering from the wrist injury that triggered the original seat swap back in August. We’ve covered how that math actually breaks down for Red Bull elsewhere. What’s different this week is that Lawson doesn’t even have Zandvoort or Monza to lean on for reference, because nobody has raced at the Madring before. It’s a walled-in street track where drivers are still turning the wheel as they brake, and where blind, high-speed corners punish anyone who eases in gently.
Feel Isn’t a Vibe in a 2026 Car
Under the old regulations, borrowing a teammate’s seat mid-season was mostly a muscle-memory problem: seating position, brake bias, a different steering weight. The 2026 rules have made that swap considerably harder, because the car itself isn’t a fixed object anymore. Setup is a running negotiation between chassis, active aero and energy deployment, and every driver’s inputs shape that negotiation differently. George Russell flagged how tricky the Madring’s braking zones are, warning that “locking tyres is going to be easy”. Alex Albon pointed out that whether a corner gets driven flat or with a lift “has a big effect on deployment”, meaning a driver’s own throttle habits now feed directly into how the hybrid system behaves, not just how fast the lap looks. Kimi Antonelli summed up the setup problem simply: a compromise that helps in the chicanes can hurt in the fast corners, and there’s no version of a 2026 car that’s neutral for every driving style.
That’s the trap Lawson is in. He said as much himself this week, explaining that in his own car “you have many things that are very suited for you,” which three borrowed weekends in the RB22 can’t replicate. Max Verstappen made almost the identical point about his own seat heading into a track nobody had data for: get a good feeling with the car, he said, and “you’re actually a bit more competitive.” Feel isn’t an abstraction in a 2026 car. It’s the difference between trusting the deployment map through a blind corner and lifting half a beat early because you’re not sure what the car is about to do.
No Development Bailout Coming
None of this is happening in a vacuum where Red Bull can simply out-engineer the problem. The team’s power unit trajectory for the rest of the year was effectively locked in once the FIA closed its second engine catch-up review, a ruling that didn’t go Red Bull’s way. With no hardware rescue arriving mid-season, driver execution is carrying more of the load than usual, at exactly the moment one of the team’s two cars is being driven by someone still learning its habits.
What Saturday Actually Tells Us
Track evolution at a brand-new venue is steep. Grip builds fast over a weekend as more rubber goes down, and that should claw back time for everyone, Lawson included. Watch whether he closes the gap to Tsunoda, whose own 2026 has become its own story, as Saturday’s running adds laps, or whether it holds steady regardless of how much the track improves. That’s a far more honest audition result than anything in Friday’s session sheets. It’s also worth watching Hadjar’s recovery timeline once the paddock leaves Madrid, because every lap Lawson doesn’t find now becomes one more data point in a decision Red Bull will eventually have to make.
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