After Sergio Pérez was unsurprisingly sacked, his replacement was announced within a day: Liam Lawson. Christian Horner has revealed what made him stand out over Yuki Tsunoda.
The difference was very minimal, the decision was very close, in the end Lawson won thanks to better race pace:
“The decision was incredibly close because Yuki is a very fast driver. He has many seasons of experience, he showed great results in the tyre test in Abu Dhabi, and the engineers are still praising what they saw there. But when we compared his data with Liam’s, we saw that his data was better than Tsunoda’s, mainly in terms of race pace. Their qualifying results are almost identical, but you can’t deny the fact that Lawson has only done 11 races, so he will definitely be much better and stronger with time.
He is mentally strong, he has a great resistance to stress, but the most important thing will be not to put too much pressure on him. He has to face the best driver of his generation, but it will be best if he completely ignores what is happening with Max Verstappen and focuses solely on his task and development. If he does that, he will do well!” said Christian Horner.
