After Sergio Perez was sent off, as expected, his successor was named within a day. It is none other than Liam Lawson. Christian Horner revealed what he decided in his favor against Yuki Tsunoda.
The difference was very small, the decision was very close, in the end Lawson was chosen for his best pace in the race:
“The decision was extremely tough, because Yuki is a very fast rider. He already has a lot of season experience, he had a very good performance in the tyre test in Abu Dhabi, the engineers still praise him today for what they saw there. But when we compared his data with Liam, we saw that his data is better than Tsunoda’s, especially in terms of race pace. Their qualifying results are almost identical, however you can’t deny the fact that Lawson only has 11 races under his belt, it is certain that with time he will become much better and stronger.
He is mentally strong, he has a great capacity for endurance, but the most important thing will be not to put too much pressure on him. He will have to face the best driver of his generation, but he will do well to completely ignore what is happening with Max Verstappen and concentrate exclusively on his own task and his own development. If that is the case, he will behave well!” - said Christian Horner.
