Red Bull’s Liam Lawson felt that his RB21 car isn’t “fast enough,” after a difficult Friday Practice for the 2025 Australian Grand Prix.
A tough opening day of running saw Lawson find just 0.002 seconds between FP1 and FP2 as he finished both sessions 1.2s off the pace of McLaren and Ferrari, which the Kiwi put down to his car simply not being “fast enough,” despite having “felt comfortable in the car today,” across both practices.
This weekend also marks Lawson’s first time racing at the Albert Park circuit – having departed F2 at the end of 2022 just before the circuit joined the calendar in 2023, but the Kiwi was surprised at how much work he had to do compared to when he normally goes to a new circuit.
“Day one on a new track you are expecting to have work to do but not this much. We can’t really pinpoint why it’s been tricky out there so far, if we knew we could fix it a lot quicker.
We need to pick it up on short run pace, but the long run pace wasn’t great either, so yeah, a lot to do. So, it will be a challenge for the Team, but we will aim to improve for tomorrow.”
His teammate and four-time reigning champion, Max Verstappen though was more bullish as he believed Red Bull’s issues laid within their lack of grip in the first and final sectors, although he did echo Lawson’s view that their issues are hard to nail down due to the balance being stable.
“There are no major balance issues, so I think this makes things a bit harder to fix. But this isn’t anything that we didn’t expect when we arrived here.”
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