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 third straight Grand Prix in the team’s second car this weekend, with Isack Hadjar still sidelined by the wrist injury that first forced a seat swap back in August. It’s the least surprising news of the week. It’s also the most revealing, once you look past the headline.
The team’s statement was short and carefully worded: Lawson will continue “to drive alongside Max” in Madrid because Hadjar’s recovery “continues to progress positively,” though he’s “not yet ready to return to the cockpit.” Hadjar will be trackside supporting the team rather than in the car, which is a soft landing spot for a driver Red Bull still clearly considers its guy in that seat.
This is the third consecutive round Lawson has covered, after stepping in at Zandvoort and again at Monza. What makes round three different is the venue. The Spanish Grand Prix has relocated to Madrid’s new Madring circuit, a 5.416km layout hosting its first Formula 1 race this weekend. Nobody in the field has raced there before, which means Lawson isn’t just filling in for an injured teammate. He’s doing it on a track with zero institutional data for anyone to lean on.
The Math Doesn’t Flatter Anyone
Here’s the detail that gets lost in the who’s-driving-what shuffle: championship points follow the driver, not the seat. Hadjar still sits eighth with 71 points, banked before his injury. Lawson, who started the year at Racing Bulls before moving into the senior car, is ninth with 51. That gap barely moved after Zandvoort and Monza. Lawson picked up a points-scoring P7 at Zandvoort, then a lifeless P14 at Monza after a grid penalty for power unit changes dropped him to a pit-lane start and contact with Nico Hulkenberg forced a mid-race front-wing change. Three races into this stopgap, Red Bull is effectively watching to see whether its emergency substitute can out-score its injured starter before the starter even gets back in the car.
Tsunoda’s Audition Isn’t Going Well Either
The other half of this shuffle is Yuki Tsunoda, who returned to the Racing Bulls seat Lawson vacated and has scored a single point across two races back, a P11 at Zandvoort and a P10 at Monza. His rookie teammate, Arvid Lindblad, has 29 points this season. For a driver whose F1 future has already been a topic of speculation, two quiet weekends is not the reassertion of value he needed.
There’s a team dimension to this too. Racing Bulls hold fifth in the constructors’ standings with 75 points, just 13 clear of Alpine. That’s a genuine fight, and it means every point Tsunoda or Lindblad picks up, or fails to, in Madrid matters to Racing Bulls’ season in a way that has nothing to do with the senior team’s driver soap opera.
Where This Sits in Red Bull’s Season
Max Verstappen is still doing the heavy lifting up front. He finished third at Monza, which team principal Laurent Mekies called “a step in the right direction” after a season spent chasing Mercedes’ pace under the new-for-2026 regulations. But Verstappen sits sixth in the drivers’ championship with 127 points, 140 behind runaway leader Kimi Antonelli, and Red Bull is fourth in the constructors’ table, well off the podium places. None of that changes because of who’s strapped into the second car. It’s the backdrop that makes Red Bull’s decision to extend Verstappen through 2030 make sense: the team is building for whenever this regulatory cycle turns back in its favor, not panicking over one lean year.
What actually matters this weekend has less to do with Lawson than with everyone around him. Watch whether Hadjar comes out of Madrid with a real return date, whether Tsunoda can find anything on a circuit nobody has data for, and whether Lawson banks enough results to make his temporary job look like a genuine audition rather than a favor. On a track this unfamiliar, first practice will tell Red Bull more about all three than another team statement ever could.
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