Horner Says Lawson Should Never Have Been Promoted — His 2026 Results Tell a Different Story
GOATIFYChristian Horner has reopened one of Red Bull's most uncomfortable driver decisions. In a new account of Liam Lawson's brief promotion to the senior Formula 1 team, the former team principal says the New Zealander should never have been placed alongside Max Verstappen so early. That is a striking admission about a move which lasted just two race weekends in 2025—and it lands at a moment when Lawson's 2026 performances make the original judgment look less straightforward.
Horner's explanation is not that Lawson lacked talent. His concern was timing: Red Bull had handed a driver with only 11 Grand Prix starts a seat notorious for punishing even experienced racers. The distinction matters because Lawson has since scored consistently at Racing Bulls and returned to the senior car for three races while Isack Hadjar recovered from a wrist injury. The argument now is not simply whether the first promotion failed. It is whether the team confused a premature opportunity with a verdict on the driver's ceiling.
The promotion was a gamble Red Bull knew was bigger than 11 races
Red Bull's decision at the end of 2024 came after Sergio Perez's form had deteriorated enough to make another season untenable. The vacancy beside Verstappen was prestigious, but it was also among the most demanding jobs on the grid. Whoever took it would be measured against a multiple world champion, expected to deliver constructors' points immediately and asked to learn a car developed around a highly specific performance window.
Lawson had shown flashes of pace during substitute appearances and a late-season spell at the junior team. Yet 11 previous Formula 1 starts are not the same as a full season of preparation. The New Zealander was still learning how to build a race weekend from Friday practice to Sunday strategy, and Red Bull was asking him to do that under the sharpest possible comparison. Horner now argues that the organization placed too much weight on potential and too little on the size of the jump.
The key admission in his book is that he was uncomfortable with the promotion at the time. It reframes the choice as a gamble the leadership knew was substantial, rather than a straightforward selection that only looked wrong in hindsight. Red Bull had considered alternatives and ultimately chose to accelerate its own junior. The consequences were swift: Lawson struggled in Australia, then qualified at the back in China and failed to score. He was replaced by Yuki Tsunoda before Japan.
Those two weekends were real evidence of a difficult adaptation, but hardly a complete evaluation of a young driver's long-term ability. Even established racers can take months to find confidence in an unfamiliar car, particularly when every missed braking point becomes a national headline. Red Bull's problem was that it could not afford to wait for a normal learning curve. It needed results from the second car immediately, and the promotion was judged on a timeline that made patient development almost impossible.
The book complicates Horner's earlier defense of the demotion
Horner's new account also creates an awkward distinction between two separate decisions: choosing Lawson for the seat and removing him after two races. Earlier in 2026, Horner publicly suggested that the early demotion was not his preferred course and pointed toward pressure from the junior-driver structure associated with Helmut Marko. His latest reflection is sharper about the original promotion itself. Both positions could be true—someone can oppose a rushed promotion and still believe an even faster demotion is damaging—but they invite scrutiny of who actually owned the process.
That distinction was largely lost in the immediate reaction to the 2025 switch. Red Bull described the replacement as a sporting decision and said Lawson would benefit from returning to an environment he knew. In practice, the move left a driver with almost no chance to recover from an awful start. He went from being trusted with one of Formula 1's biggest seats to being removed before the third Grand Prix. The signal to every future Red Bull junior was unmistakable: the promotion could be won through promise, but retaining it required instant proof.
Horner's comments now sound less like a criticism of Lawson's character than an admission of flawed succession planning. Red Bull had an unusually difficult second seat, a dominant lead driver and a development system built to produce ambitious young racers. Those ingredients do not automatically fit together. A junior can be the best available prospect while still being the wrong choice for a specific cockpit at a specific moment.
The later return of Lawson as a substitute in 2026 illustrates why timing is central. When Hadjar's wrist injury created a temporary vacancy, Lawson knew the organization, had accumulated substantially more experience and could approach the assignment with a clearer understanding of what the team needed. The short-term comeback was not proof he should have been promoted in 2025; it was evidence that his first failure did not permanently define him.
Lawson's 2026 points show why the first judgment was incomplete
Lawson's current campaign is the strongest counterweight to any suggestion that two difficult races told the whole story. The latest report credits him with roughly three-fifths of Racing Bulls' constructors' points and a clear head-to-head advantage over rookie Arvid Lindblad across their shared starts. It also records 14 points from Lawson's three-race return to Red Bull while Hadjar was unavailable. Those numbers are not championship-winning statistics, but they show a driver making a useful contribution in two different team environments.
His results also underline a lesson that gets lost when the conversation revolves around the second Red Bull seat. Racing Bulls is not merely a holding pen. It offers young drivers the continuity to build relationships with engineers, understand setup changes and turn an imperfect weekend into a points finish. Lawson's 2026 improvement has been made possible by exactly that kind of repetition. Confidence can grow through familiar routines as much as through outright car speed.
The three stand-in races alongside Verstappen deserve context. They were an emergency assignment rather than a permanent promotion, and the car's 2026 characteristics differ from the 2025 machine that caused so much trouble. It would be misleading to treat a better substitute spell as proof that the first decision was right all along. Still, it weakens the argument that Lawson simply could not handle the senior team's expectations. Experience changed the equation, and the same driver was better equipped to exploit the opportunity.
There is a forward-looking consequence, too. Racing Bulls is expected to consider continuity with Lawson and Lindblad for 2027, while Hadjar has already been backed to remain alongside Verstappen. That arrangement would let Red Bull keep two promising drivers on separate development tracks rather than forcing another early reshuffle. Lawson has avoided making his future the headline, emphasizing his aim of scoring points every weekend. Given the turbulence of his first promotion, that narrower focus looks like a sensible way to make the strongest possible case.
Horner's admission should therefore be read as a warning about the system, not a verdict on the person. A team can identify genuine talent and still damage its development by choosing the wrong moment to use it. Lawson's 2026 season is a reminder that careers rarely move in a clean straight line—and that a second chance can reveal what the first one never had time to show.
Red Bull cannot undo the decision to elevate Lawson after 11 starts or the call to replace him two races later. Horner's new account at least acknowledges that the first step carried risks the team underestimated. The more important development is that Lawson has continued to build a credible Formula 1 career rather than letting that brief spell become his defining chapter.
As the season moves toward Austin and the final six Grands Prix, his task is simple: keep scoring, keep outperforming expectations at Racing Bulls and let the results speak for themselves. The irony is that the driver once judged too early now offers Red Bull a useful lesson in what patience can produce.
