Carlos Sainz Jnr said the news Red Bull had dropped Liam Lawson after just two rounds came as no surprise to him.
The former Red Bull junior team member said their decision to send Lawson back to their junior squad so early is typical of how they run their young driver programme.
“I just think it’s nothing new,” he told the official F1 channel. “It’s just the Red Bull and the way things are handled in Red Bull and the way things go in Red Bull.
“We’ve seen it in the last 10 years in Formula 1, or since I’m in F1, that’s the way things are done there. One day you get the chance, the next day if you don’t do exactly the way you’re expected to do you get the upgrade or the downgrade.”
Sainz spent almost three seasons driving for Red Bull’s second team in F1 before leaving the team. While Max Verstappen, his first team mate in F1, was promoted to Red Bull in his second season, the team never did the same for Sainz and did not take the chance to hire him as a replacement for the struggling Sergio Perez last year.
However Sainz declined to say whether Red Bull is facing a shortage of capable team mates to Verstappen now because it failed to give him an opportunity.
“Everyone says it’s the toughest job in Formula 1 being next to Max in a car that Max knows so well,” he said. “If that’s what people are [saying], I guess it’s a good thing for me, but at the same time I don’t care because I’m in the place that I want to be right now and in a good place also for my future, for myself and I cannot wait to see where we go.”
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Red Bull has a track record of making early changes to its driver line-up. Four races into 2016 they demoted Daniil Kvyat, in his second year at the team, in favour of Verstappen. Three years later Red Bull dropped Pierre Gasly after giving him just 12 races.
Gasly acknowledged he “can obviously relate” to Lawson’s situation but said it’s “very difficult to judge anything from the outside” after Red Bull replaced him with Yuki Tsunoda.
“I think only Liam can know his situation and know all the details from it and [you’ve] just got to respect that we’re all trying our best with the tools we have,” he said. “I’ve got no doubts both of them are going to do really well but it’s not really for me to comment because you never really know what’s going on.”
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2025 Japanese Grand Prix
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- Verstappen keeps a lid on his dissatisfaction over Red Bull’s Lawson shambles
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