Last minute setup change blamed for Liam Lawson’s nightmare Australian GP

Sky Sports analyst Ted Kravitz believes a last-minute setup change from Red Bull ruined any chance of a Liam Lawson recovery at the Australian Grand Prix.

Lawson endured a miserable first weekend as a Red Bull driver in Melbourne.

The Kiwi was knocked out in Q1 after an error-strewn final lap and crashed out of Sunday’s race.

In Lawson’s defence, he was on the back foot heading into qualifying after a technical issue curtailed his running in practice.

Plus, Lawson was the only driver on the grid who had never raced at Albert Park previously.

In a bid to turn his weekend around, Red Bull took Lawson’s car out of parc ferme conditions and changed his rear wing.

Red Bull hoped that the increase in downforce levels would give Lawson more confidence and allow him to move up the order.

However, it didn’t help Lawson as he struggled for pace before crashing out.

After the race, Kravitz said in his post-race notebook: “This car is not particularly quick, the Red Bull. I mean, it’s quick enough for P2 obviously and to be P3 on the grid, but you look at Liam Lawson’s problems today and you can understand how Red Bull would really take and how Max said, I’ll take a P2 while they try and figure it out.

“Liam Lawson was a DNF, all of the rookies apart from Kimi Antonelli crashed today. But Liam started from the pit lane with more downforce, a higher downforce rear wing and a new beam wing to try and stay out of trouble in the wet and all that did was make the car very, very slow.

“He made no impact with too much wing on the car, Liam Lawson, absolutely no impact and then spun and crashed in the same place as his Red Bull stablemate Isack Hadjar.

“So, a very poor showing all round that Liam Lawson, probably not his fault because they seemingly had too much wing on the car thinking it was the right thing to do, but it was not.”

Lawson labels Australia weekend “pretty terrible”

There were very few positives for Lawson to take from the weekend in Australia.

Lawson will have to bounce back quickly to avoid pressure mounting on him.

His predecessors - Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon and Sergio Perez - all struggled to get close to Max Verstappen during their respective stints with the team.

Reflecting on the race, Lawson said: “This whole weekend was pretty terrible. Today we were too slow at the start and then we gambled.

“It nearly worked, but it wasn’t to be. Starting from the pitlane was tough and we just didn’t really have the speed in the first stint on the inter.

“We struggled with the fronts too much, so we will analyse and look at that in detail before the next race.”