Liam Lawson spies major opportunity in fresh F1 arms race

Liam Lawson feels his Racing Bulls team can capitalise on the major opportunities presented by the scale of upgrades in F1's new era.

Towards the end of the ground-effects era, teams rarely brought major upgrade packages due to the laws of diminishing returns as the regulations matured over the four-year cycle. 

In contrast, the new regulations offer plentiful opportunities for teams to bring big upgrades at a quick pace to leapfrog rivals, with this being something Lawson feels Racing Bulls can capitalise on.

After a strong start to the season, the team is in seventh in the constructors' standings on 14 points, just two behind the senior Red Bull team, with Lawson just two points behind Max Verstappen as the leading Red Bull driver in the standings.

The New Zealander felt that the upgrade push would be what the team is "chasing the hardest" whilst maintaining the strong trackside operations at the start of the campaign. 

"The main thing is going to be on the development side for teams, and I think you see really big differences when you have a car that's early on [in the regulation cycle]," Lawson told media, including RacingNews365. 

"Last year, we would bring fewer upgrades because we were finding it harder to find differences, and those upgrades would maybe be a few points of downforce, and you might find a few hundredths of a second, and that would be a solid upgrade.

"This year, we are expecting to bring much bigger things throughout the year, and the rate of that will hopefully be faster as well, so that side of things is what we are going to be chasing the hardest.

"And that comes down to the hard work we're doing on-track, the work we're doing in the simulator, trying to learn how to optimise those things, and that is the biggest focus at this early point in the year.

"We've done a good job so far, obviously touch wood, but reliability has been pretty strong, especially compared to some other teams.

"Strategy-wise, we've done a good job, and the decision-making has been pretty good, and we've been able to extract everything out of our package each weekend, and possibly more than we should have, so it has been positive."