Red Bull make Liam Lawson admission: 'It was not the end he deserved'

Laurent Mekies has conceded that Liam Lawson's two-round stint with Red Bull at the beginning of the 2025 F1 season was "not the end that he deserved" with the Milton Keynes-based squad.

After just two events, the New Zealander was jettisoned from his RB21 and sent back to Racing Bulls, switching places with Yuki Tsunoda.

The 24-year-old went scoreless across the rounds in Melbourne and Shanghai, and, on the face of it, appeared to struggle to adapt to the idiosyncrasies of the Red Bull, which has long been accepted as a difficult car to drive.

However, it has since emerged that, particularly on the Chinese Grand Prix weekend, the six-time F1 constructors' champions ran Lawson using an extremely experimental set-up, with his subsequent lack of performance then used as part of the justification for replacing him with Tsunoda.

The Japanese driver went on to lose his seat alongside Max Verstappen at the end of the year whilst Lawson has since established himself at Racing Bulls as one of F1's strongest midfield runners.

Ahead of his return to Red Bull at Zandvoort in place of the injured Isack Hadjar, Mekies addressed the contentious decision by his predecessor, Christian Horner, and co to make a driver change so soon into the campaign last term.

"It [was] a very difficult first two races last year for him with the team," the Red Bull team principal told F1.com before the Dutch Grand Prix. "I'm sure it was not the end that he deserved.

"If we look at how he has managed to reconstruct from there, to rebuild, and the level of performance he has been showing ever since, consistently, with the old generation of car, with this generation of car, I think it’s very well deserved that he gets that chance."

Lawson went on to have a stellar weekend in the RB22, qualifying only a tenth of a second adrift of Verstappen and picking up six points for his seventh place finish, which was the best result he reasonably could have hoped for.

Tsunoda, having deputised at Racing Bulls, also fared well, narrowly missing out on points but beating Arvid Lindblad in the second VCARB 03 to P11.

Mekies felt that he too was deserving of the opportunity, adding: "Yuki also gets the chance to go back behind the wheel, and he has been deserving that as well, working patiently in the simulator through the year, and that’s another pleasant twist of the weekend."