Liam Lawson Faces Interlagos Challenge with Racing Bulls
Liam Lawson and Racing Bulls are walking a tightrope at Interlagos, caught between a car that works in the dry and one that might just survive a soaking Sao Paulo Sunday.
The New Zealander ended Friday with a mixed bag: 10th in FP1, then shuffled back to 13th in FP2, this time behind team-mate Arvid Lindblad. The team had rolled the dice on a new set-up direction with the VCARB03. It backfired.
What they found was not hidden speed, but heavy understeer.
“We started a little bit stronger this morning, and then we tried something that didn't really work in FP2,” Lawson said, outlining a day that drifted away from them as the temperatures dropped. The tweaks they made pushed the car the wrong way for the colder conditions, exaggerating the front-end push just as the track demanded the opposite.
The complication is not just about pace. It’s about timing. With rain forecast for Sunday’s race, the set-up choice becomes a trap: the configuration they lock in for qualifying on a likely dry Saturday must then be carried into what could be a wet Grand Prix.
So Racing Bulls are staring at a familiar Interlagos dilemma. Build a car for the short, sharp demands of a dry qualifying lap, or compromise for race day chaos on a wet, greasy track.
Lawson’s instinct is to rewind.
“We’ll probably go back on that,” he admitted. FP1, with its more neutral balance, now looks like the reference point. “I think we had a better car [in FP1], so we'll try to start with something similar [in FP3], and then we'll see what happens with the weather because it is probably going to rain.”
The cold only sharpened the difficulty. Around Interlagos, tyre preparation is everything, and on Friday it became a headache.
“Putting the lap together and basically doing a good job, I think it's very, very tough here,” Lawson said. The out-lap is short, the tyres reluctant to switch on, and Turn 1 arrives before the rubber is fully awake. “For the tyres, the laps are really short for warm-up, so we're struggling to get everything properly ready for Turn 1.”
Any hesitation, any traffic, and the lap evaporates.
“Any traffic queuing in the pit lane on track can really, really affect Turn 1, so it's going to be interesting, especially Q1 when everybody's on track together,” he added. One mistimed gap, one slow car in the final corners, and a set of tyres is wasted.
Yet all of that might be a sideshow.
“But I mean, the bigger question mark is going to be the rain.”
The numbers told their own story in FP2. The balance shift stunned the team.
“I think we're pretty surprised by how much of an effect what we changed had because the car was probably one of the worst balances we've had this season, or at least in the recent races in FP2,” Lawson admitted. A few adjustments turned a promising package into something he had to wrestle rather than lean on.
The cooler track only deepened the problem. “When the track temperature comes down, we just had so much understeer in the car, so we'll try and revert on that [for Saturday].”
Yet there is a hard limit on how bold they can be. With parc fermé rules and the looming threat of a wet race, Racing Bulls cannot simply chase the perfect qualifying car.
“But obviously, we can't change anything drastically because if it rains, you need to have a good car in the rain as well.”
So Lawson goes into Saturday with a simple plan and a complicated reality: step back towards the comfort of FP1, tame the understeer, and hope that the compromise they choose on Saturday morning doesn’t come back to haunt them when the Sao Paulo skies finally open.
