Lindblad out-qualifies Lawson again, in a different car
Arvid Lindblad beat Liam Lawson into Sprint Qualifying's final segment at Zandvoort on Friday, only this time the two were driving different cars. Lawson is racing for Red Bull this weekend, covering for the injured Isack Hadjar. Lindblad stayed at Racing Bulls, the team the two normally share. Lindblad left Lawson 0.350 seconds short of a place in the top ten with his SQ2 lap, and Yuki Tsunoda, in the second Racing Bulls car, finished just 0.009 seconds behind Lawson's Red Bull. Both drivers shared a car for Lindblad's previous three wins over Lawson in qualifying. Friday's was the first that did not.
The margins
Lawson had one hour of practice in the RB22 before Sprint Qualifying began, following Hadjar's wrist injury during the summer break. He used it well. He went 0.165 seconds inside Max Verstappen's time on his first flying lap in SQ1, enough to put him sixth and make him Red Bull's quicker car on the board. Lawson could not find the same step in SQ2. A snap of oversteer on his final lap ended his session there, and he had no explanation ready when he was asked what had gone wrong. "Honestly, I don't really know," Lawson said. "It's been an interesting day, but normally you sort of improve through qualifying, and we started SQ1 quite strong, and then we didn't make the same step that everybody else did." Verstappen ended up sixth for the Sprint, over half a second off pole in a car he had called fourth best in the field before the summer break. He offered his own reading of the session after his final run. "I guess we outqualified one car," he said. Red Bull promoted Lawson into this same car in December 2024, then dropped him after two races the following March and replaced him with Yuki Tsunoda. He rebuilt his season at Racing Bulls alongside a rookie, Lindblad, and arrived at Zandvoort as the leading driver outside the top four teams, ninth in the championship on 43 points. Lindblad had been asked on Thursday why Red Bull chose Lawson over him for the stand-in role. He did not sound bothered by the answer. "It's my first time here in Zandvoort. It's a Sprint weekend. I'm only halfway through my rookie season, so I think it was a more logical decision to go with Liam," Lindblad said. "With me, it would have been a bit higher risk."
The Racing Bulls car
Racing Bulls sit fifth in the constructors' championship, on 66 points, five clear of Alpine, a position the team has never held before in any of its previous identities. Lawson has scored 43 of those points and Lindblad 23. Lindblad had already out-qualified Lawson in three straight sessions since the summer break before Friday, by margins RaceFans described as decent rather than marginal. Team principal Alan Permane has said he does not manage the pairing to protect one driver over the other. "Honestly, when they go on track, they're driver A and driver B to me," Permane said earlier this month. "I don't care which order they come in. Constructors' championship is everything for us." R1V4L argued this week that Nikola Tsolov's route onto the 2027 grid runs through Lawson's Racing Bulls seat, and that the size of the gap between that car and a Red Bull matters to the question as much as Lawson's own form does. Tsolov, who leads this year's Formula 2 championship, is due to test a Racing Bulls car at Imola on 27 August. Friday's session undercuts that argument rather than supporting it. A driver new to the RB22, with one hour of practice behind him, finished within four hundredths of a second of Racing Bulls' regular pairing across two separate comparisons. If that gap holds through the rest of the weekend, the case for treating a Red Bull seat as the faster option gets harder to make on pace alone. Lawson starts Saturday's Sprint eleventh, between the two Racing Bulls cars he has spent all season learning.
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