After Sergio Perez was sent off, as expected, his successor was named within a day. None other than Liam Lawson. Christian Horner revealed what decided in his favor over Yuki Tsunoda.
The difference was very minimal, the decision was very close, but ultimately Lawson won due to his better race pace:
“The decision was incredibly tight because Yuki is a very fast driver. He has a lot of experience from many seasons, and he performed exceptionally well in the tire test held in Abu Dhabi, the engineers still praise what they saw there. However, when we compared his data with Liam's, we saw that his data was better than Tsunoda's, especially in terms of race pace. Their qualifying results are almost identical, but we cannot deny the fact that Lawson has only 11 races under his belt, and he will surely be much better and stronger over time.
He is mentally strong, has a great capacity for handling pressure, but the most important thing will be not to put too much pressure on him. He has to compete against the best driver of his generation, but he will do best if he completely ignores what is happening with Max Verstappen and focuses solely on his own tasks and development. If he does that, he will hold his own!” - said Christian Horner.
