One injured wrist, three careers, and a Bulgarian waiting
Updated: Aug 24
Isack Hadjar hurt his wrist over the summer break, so Liam Lawson will drive the second Red Bull at Zandvoort this weekend.
Red Bull's statement said only that the injury happened during the shutdown. De Telegraaf reported a gym session, the BBC said a boxing workout, and the team declined to elaborate. Yuki Tsunoda, reserve for both teams and without a race seat all year, takes Lawson's Racing Bulls car alongside Arvid Lindblad. That's the news, and everyone has it. What nobody has written is how many careers move because one 21-year-old picked up a weight badly.
Lawson has already earned this
Start with the man actually getting in the car. Lawson is ninth in the championship after eleven rounds, with points in all but three of them. Best of the rest behind the front-running teams. Comfortably ahead of his rookie team-mate. He is also, on paper, out of a job in four months. His contract runs to the end of this season and no further. So do Hadjar's and Lindblad's. Red Bull's four cockpits are technically all open for 2027, and everything above them waits on Max Verstappen, who hasn't said what he's doing. This is the audition Lawson never got the first time. In December 2024 Red Bull handed him the Verstappen seat with eleven starts to his name. In March 2025 they took it back after two races, Christian Horner calling it a purely sporting decision. He had never driven either circuit before. He got three qualifying sessions to prove a career. Zandvoort he knows. He made his F1 debut here in 2023, covering for Daniel Ricciardo's broken hand. His entire career has been assembled from other people's injuries.
Tsunoda gets forty-eight hours
The man vacating the Racing Bulls seat is doing so for someone who lost it to him, then lost it back. Run the sequence. March 2025: Red Bull pull Lawson out after two races and put Tsunoda in. December 2025: Hadjar replaces Tsunoda, Lindblad joins Lawson, and Tsunoda becomes a test and reserve driver. He found out when Helmut Marko told him privately after the Qatar Grand Prix. He said in Abu Dhabi that he was disappointed, and then used a word ESPN printed with dashes through it. It will be his 90th start for the Faenza team he debuted with in 2021, when it was AlphaTauri, and his first Grand Prix entry since last December. He has 111 races behind him and a best finish of fourth, from that first season. Two days before the call came, Motorsport.com reported he is in talks with Meyer Shank Racing about an IndyCar seat for 2027. Honda, his backer since 2016, left Red Bull for Aston Martin this year while Red Bull went to Ford. Meyer Shank run Honda engines. Team co-owner Mike Shank says nothing is decided and they're talking to everybody, which is what team owners say in August. Tsunoda has been honest about IndyCar before. He'd consider it, he likes the US, but he couldn't picture 200mph at Indianapolis for two hours and said plainly that it scared him. That was while he still had a car.
The seat behind the seat
Which brings us to the person with most riding on Lawson's weekend, who isn't in Formula 1 at all. Nikola Tsolov leads Formula 2 in his first full season. Six wins, including a sweep of Silverstone, and three in a row at one point, a first at that level. He became the first Bulgarian to win an F2 race in the opening round at Melbourne. Racing Bulls principal Alan Permane said in July that Tsolov is next in line at Faenza, and that calling him a name on the radar was an understatement. Eight days after Zandvoort, on 27 August, Tsolov drives Racing Bulls' 2025 car at Imola under the previous-car testing rules. He has 25 superlicence points, all from finishing runner-up in F3 last year. He needs 40. A top-five finish in F2 gets him there.
What he doesn't have is a seat, and only one is plausibly available. Here's the part that matters. If Lawson is quick this weekend, Red Bull have a case to promote him, which vacates Racing Bulls. If he's slow, he was already the driver under most pressure in the family. Either result opens the same door. The only outcome that keeps Tsolov out is Lawson being good enough to keep his current drive but not good enough to be promoted. Which is roughly where he has been all season. Replacing a driver who has scored in eight of eleven races with one who has never started a Grand Prix would be a decision about potential rather than performance. None of which is Tsolov's fault, he is doing exactly what a junior is supposed to do, in public, in the category directly below. Red Bull have simply made that decision before. They made it to Lawson twice. Being the best of the rest has never once saved anybody there.
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