Reflecting on his return to Racing Bulls, Liam Lawson denies that his confidence took any knocks after his two Components 1 races with Crimson Bull, and contends that he hadn’t pushed sufficient to find out if he was actually struggling.
The Kiwi reunited with the Italian squad after only a brace of grand prix weekends with the lead Crimson Bull workforce, the place his outcomes and hole to Max Verstappen had been thought-about sufficient for Christian Horner and Helmut Marko to drop him in favour of Yuki Tsunoda.
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Lawson had struggled with restricted operating in Crimson Bull’s RB21, having confronted a water stress problem in testing, a turbocharger drawback in Australia’s FP3 session, and was then thrust straight into motion with one observe session in China. The New Zealander thus certified 18th and twentieth for his two grands prix for the workforce, twentieth for the China dash race, and in addition crashed out within the Albert Park season opener.
Requested if he was rebuilding his confidence after a bruising sojourn with Crimson Bull, Lawson asserted that it by no means wanted to be restored within the first place; as a substitute, his focus was merely on attending to grips with a brand new automotive – the VCARB 02 – with restricted operating.
“Actually, confidence-wise, nothing actually modified from the beginning of the 12 months,” Lawson declared. “I did not spend wherever close to sufficient time [in the Red Bull] for me to replicate on these two races and go, ‘oh my god, I’ve actually struggled on this automotive, I’ve misplaced my capability’.
“It wasn’t actually like that. I did two races that had been two very messy weekends from a variety of elements, however I believe confidence-wise that did not actually change.
“It is simply been about getting used to a brand new automotive once more, and the workforce, and making an attempt to do all that as shortly as potential. I believe that is actually been the place the main focus is at. Confidence-wise I really feel, truthfully, as I all the time have.”
Liam Lawson, Racing Bulls
Picture by: Mark Thompson – Getty Pictures
Lawson additionally opened up on the problem of beginning on the entrance foot throughout the observe periods in a race, along with his personal feeling being that the number of situations on the opening races has made it troublesome to get a superb stability with the tyres.
He says that lots of the variables concerned will not be simply replicable within the simulator, guaranteeing that the groups have had their work reduce out in figuring out how finest to make use of the tyres on a preparation lap.
“To be sincere, it appears like somewhat little bit of a tough 12 months with tyres, with set-up,” he defined. “I believe warm-up, we have had very totally different situations.
“We went from Japan being very chilly to Bahrain being extremely popular and while you’re making an attempt to construct the tyre up within the excellent means, that is a unique factor to work on, and you’ll’t actually simulate that in a simulator.
“You are confronted with much more real-life situations that you simply’re not going to simulate, and I believe this 12 months that stuff that we possibly do not simulate has been extra of a problem than in previous years.
“The automotive set-up itself, we are able to simulate that and I believe we now have that in a reasonably good place, but it surely’s actually that different stuff which you could’t really actually work on that may be fairly troublesome.”
Images from Saudi Arabian GP – Thursday
On this article
Jake Boxall-Legge
Components 1
Liam Lawson
Racing Bulls
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