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Lessons from swapping Tsunoda' and Lawson's seats

Regarding the article :-

 The hard lessons Yuki Tsunoda and Liam Lawson learned after swapping F1 seats

There are clues to the problem in this article I think. Tsunoda's comments about how he felt driving the Racing Bulls.

Tsunoda was comfortable in the Racing Bull because he'd been driving, testing and help shape that design philosophy for four seasons. This is a design philosophy that has to be a little forgiving in terms of set-up since it is expected to have driver changes at least from season to season, it being the F1 finishing school for RBR.

Lawson hasn't had a season at either team. But even where he has had more races, Racing Bulls, he's 18 starts across three cars with no pre-season testing of each new challenger.

Both of them have had a go at driving a car honed openly around Verstappen for the last seven seasons - every other driver since Ricciardo left has been hired in a support role. That honing has increasingly focussed on peak performance that Verstappen can deliver (and he has delivered in spades) - to the extent now that the peak in this ground effect age is so on edge that it's a knife edge even for him.

But that design philosophy is RBR's problem to solve, not Tsunoda's. RBR created this situation - we saw it developing with Perez as every season the updates took the car away from him.

RBR need to spend time solving their design dead-end not just throwing drivers into someone else's car and wondering why they aren't immediately on the pace.




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