Red Bull controls four seats on the F1 grid, but with five drivers battling for them, one is going to be left on the outside heading into the 2026 season.
The maths are actually even worse than that for Liam Lawson, Yuki Tsunoda, Isack Hadjar and Arvid Lindblad, with one of those four seats currently the property of Max Verstappen, and providing the bombshell of all bombshells doesn't drop, Verstappen will once again be at Red Bull for 2026.
The current consensus is that he will be joined at the senior team by Hadjar, after a mightily impressive rookie season, culminating in a podium at the Dutch GP, with Tsunoda departing after an underwhelming stint as Verstappen's number two.
That means Tsunoda is fighting with Lawson and F2 protege Lindblad for the two seats at Racing Bulls, and two into three, doesn't go.
But given the huge scale of the regulation changes coming in for 2026, there is one factor which could save Lawson, and Tsunoda, and keep Lindblad waiting for one more year, at least.
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Should Lawson stay or go?
Tracing the DNA of Racing Bulls back up its family tree will bring you to AlphaTauri and Toro Rosso, and both of those iterations followed a similar trend.
At the start of a new rules cycle, such as in 2022, the Faenza-based team generally sinks down the constructors' order from the final year of the previous cycle.
For example, in 2021, Tsunoda and Pierre Gasly combined for 142 points and sixth in the constructors', just 13 points behind the de facto Renault works team, Alpine.
In 2022, AlphaTauri plummeted to scoring just 35 points and ninth in the standings, 138 points behind Alpine in fourth.
It scored just 25 points in 2023, but as the regulations matured, the team fared slightly better in 2024 with 46 points before, peaking again in the final year of a regulatory cycle, with Lawson and Hadjar putting 82 points on the board to date to sit sixth, just 10 points clear of Aston Martin with Haas and Stake also in close attendance.
It is therefore important for this team to have as much continuity and experience as possible heading into the radical new era which awaits in 2026, and that would mean a Lawson-Tsunoda partnership.
The argument for Lindblad consists of 2026 being a complete blank sheet of paper, and thus perfect for a rookie not to be burdened by any driving habits picked up in the 2025-spec machines, but Lindblad also requires another year in F2.
He is not blowing away the field and banging on Helmut Marko's door against a relatively poor field, and is currently seventh in the standings, with more than a fair share of mistakes, although he did put in strong FP1 outings for Red Bull in place of Verstappen at Silverstone and in Mexico.
As for Lawson, he has been fast but somewhat inconsistent, with a terrible Singapore GP weekend, punctuated by two crashes, denting the head of momentum he was just starting to build, and which he only got back in Brazil with a brilliant one-stopper to seventh.
How he has bounced back from the Red Bull humiliation at the start of the year has been strong, and the New Zealander deserves at least one more year before the driver market opens up for 2027, when he will surely depart the Red Bull family given he will not be promoted back to the senior team.
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