Liam Lawson will drive the second Red Bull alongside Max Verstappen at this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix, after the team confirmed that Isack Hadjar has not recovered from the wrist injury that has kept him out since the Formula 1 summer break. It is the second race in a row that the 24 year old, who was born in Hastings and raised in Pukekohe, has been moved up from Racing Bulls to the senior team.
Red Bull and its sister team confirmed their line-ups on Wednesday afternoon in Europe, which was early Thursday morning here, for the 13th round of the season at Monza. “Liam will drive alongside Max at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza, while Isack continues to make encouraging progress following the wrist injury sustained during the summer break,” a Red Bull statement said. “The team is closely monitoring his rehabilitation and will take no unnecessary risks with his return to competition and wishes him a speedy recovery.”
Hadjar hurt the wrist while training during the shutdown between races in August and had hoped to be back this weekend. “It’s my first injury ever in my whole existence, career, whatever. So it’s weird to be on the bench. I’m not happy about it, for me and for the team,” he said when he turned up at Zandvoort, in comments reported by Reuters. “It’s not swollen, which is a good sign. Actually, it’s healing fast. Every day I have a bit more mobility and I’m hopeful for Monza.”
The rest of the shuffle stays the same as it was at the Dutch Grand Prix. Yuki Tsunoda, who is the reserve driver for both teams, takes the Racing Bulls car that Lawson normally drives and lines up alongside British rookie Arvid Lindblad. Tsunoda finished 11th at Zandvoort, one place outside the points, in his first race since losing his own seat on the grid at the end of last year.
Lawson had a strong first weekend in the RB22. He qualified eighth at Zandvoort, a bit over a tenth of a second slower than Verstappen in the same machinery, which is a fair effort given he had never driven the car in a race weekend and the Dutch round used the shortened sprint format with only one practice session. He then finished seventh on Sunday for six points. Verstappen crashed out of his home race without completing a lap, so Lawson was the only Red Bull driver to score.
Racing Bulls and Red Bull are close enough in the pit lane that the promotion is not much of a physical move, but the two cars are very different things to drive. Lawson said afterwards that getting on top of the Red Bull in so little time had been hard work. “It’s been a good weekend,” he told Formula 1. “It was good to extract everything out of Quali. It’s been tough to try and get my head around this car in a short space of time, but I’ve enjoyed it.”
He struck a similar note about Monza, which asks the opposite of a car to what Zandvoort asks. “It’s good to hear Isack is recovering well and is back in the car soon, but it’s great to have another weekend with the team,” Lawson told RacingNews365. “Zandvoort gave me a really useful first reference in the car, and having a full sprint weekend behind me means I’m coming into Monza with a much better understanding of the car and what I need from it. It’s a completely different track, and there’ll be new challenges, but I’m looking forward to building on the last weekend with the team and seeing what we can do.”
The season so far has been the best of Lawson’s career by a distance. He sits ninth in the drivers’ championship on 49 points, ahead of Pierre Gasly and more than double the 23 points scored by Lindblad in the other Racing Bulls car. Verstappen is sixth on 112 and Hadjar eighth on 68. Put another way, of the 66 points Racing Bulls have banked as a team this year, 43 of them are Lawson’s, with the six he picked up at Zandvoort counting towards Red Bull’s total instead.
That is a long way from where he was 18 months ago. Lawson started the 2025 season in the senior Red Bull car and was dropped back to the junior team after two rounds, with Tsunoda going the other way. Being asked back, even as an injury replacement, is a reasonable sign that the people who made that call have changed their minds about what he can do.
Monza will test that differently. The track is a 5.793 kilometre run of long straights broken up by three heavy braking zones, and cars are on full throttle for about 80 percent of a lap. Teams strip downforce off the wings to chase top speed, which makes the cars nervous under brakes and skittish through the chicanes. The race is 53 laps. Red Bull have also confirmed that Japanese driver Ayumu Iwasa will take over Verstappen’s car for the first practice session on Friday, one of the practice runs teams hand to young drivers during the season, so Lawson will be the only Red Bull regular on track in that hour.
The Italian Grand Prix starts at 3pm on Sunday at Monza, which is 1am on Monday morning New Zealand time, according to the official timetable. Qualifying is at 2am on Sunday morning here. Whether Lawson gets a third weekend in the car after that depends entirely on how Hadjar’s wrist comes along.
What do you make of Lawson’s second run in the Red Bull, and should the team be looking at him for a full-time seat again? Leave a comment below and let us know.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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