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)
Red Bull confirmed this week that Liam Lawson will start his second consecutive Grand Prix for the senior team, lining up alongside Max Verstappen at Monza while Isack Hadjar continues recovering from the wrist injury he picked up over the summer break. Yuki Tsunoda slides back into Lawson’s Racing Bulls seat for a second straight weekend too, which means Red Bull is running the same substitution play it ran two weeks ago at Zandvoort.
On paper, that sounds like a rerun. It isn’t. Two weeks ago, the hard part for Lawson was the car itself, an RB22 he’d never driven in anger, learned during a Zandvoort sprint weekend that handed him a single hour of practice before the grid locked in for qualifying. This time he already has a race weekend of muscle memory: he knows where the brake bias sits, how the differential behaves off a hairpin, and what the throttle map does when he asks for everything at once. What he’s walking into now is a different problem entirely, and it has nothing to do with unfamiliarity with the car.
Monza doesn’t reward a driver for knowing a car in general terms. It rewards a driver for knowing a specific, stripped-down version of it. Teams build a dedicated low-drag rear wing for this weekend that shows up nowhere else on the calendar, trim the cooling openings as tight as they dare, and gear the car for top speed rather than mechanical grip, because a huge share of a lap at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza is spent at or near full throttle. That changes how a car brakes into the first chicane, how it rotates through Lesmo, and how settled it feels flat-out toward Parabolica, all things Lawson never got to explore in the RB22, because Zandvoort’s high-downforce, banked layout demanded the opposite setup philosophy. He isn’t relearning the car. He’s learning a different version of it, with three practice sessions to do it in instead of one. It’s a technical puzzle that has nothing to do with this weekend’s nostalgia-driven Ferrari tribute livery and everything to do with what’s bolted to the back of the car.
Red Bull’s public language around Hadjar’s absence hasn’t shifted much since Zandvoort. The team’s statement says he’s making “encouraging progress” and that it will “take no unnecessary risks” with his return. That’s the responsible position for a wrist injury in a car where brake-by-wire, DRS, and a dozen rotary dials all run through the same joint, but two races missed in a row on “encouraging progress” is also the kind of phrasing a team reaches for when it isn’t ready to commit to a date. Team principal Laurent Mekies has been a little more specific in conversation, calling it a minor training injury and saying the team is taking “zero risk” with the timeline. Mekies made those comments the same Zandvoort weekend Red Bull announced Verstappen’s contract extension through 2030, tying down its most important asset just as the second seat turned into a revolving door. Read together, patience looks like the actual plan rather than a fixed comeback race.
There’s a competitive subplot here that has little to do with Lawson individually, and it connects to Red Bull’s broader pace problem this season. Mekies has said the RB22’s deficit has shrunk from more than a second off the pace at the start of the year to roughly three tenths, while also conceding the car isn’t yet capable of winning “in a fair fight.” Red Bull sits fourth in the constructors’ championship on 186 points, comfortably clear of the midfield but well off Mercedes, Ferrari, and McLaren at the front, a gap a capable stand-in isn’t going to close at a power circuit like Monza no matter how well he adapts.
Racing Bulls has more riding on this weekend than its parent team does. The junior squad sits fifth in the constructors’ table on 66 points, just three clear of Alpine, so every point Tsunoda scores in the seat Lawson vacated carries real championship weight. Tsunoda’s situation remains one of the quieter storylines of Red Bull’s year: he lost his race seat outright at the end of last season, spent months as a simulator-and-reserve name, and is now two stand-in weekends into proving he still belongs on the grid. There’s a fourth name worth watching on Friday, too. Ayumu Iwasa takes over Verstappen’s car for FP1 under F1’s rule requiring teams to hand practice time to a driver with two or fewer Grand Prix starts, meaning Red Bull’s two-car operation will run four different names across its cockpits by Sunday.
Monza’s low-drag characteristics tend to flatter whichever car carries the least aerodynamic drag and whichever driver commits most confidently through Parabolica, and that’s exactly the kind of trim where an unfamiliar setup punishes hesitation. Lawson looked settled enough at Zandvoort to bank a point-scoring seventh despite a time penalty; whether that composure survives a wing package he’s never driven behind will say more about his adaptability than anything from two weeks ago. It’s also worth watching how Hadjar’s recovery timeline lines up with the calendar. Monza is followed by Madrid’s inaugural Grand Prix next weekend, a circuit nobody on the grid has raced before, so whoever’s in the second Red Bull won’t have a returning driver’s advantage to lean on either way.
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