After Sergio Perez was sacked, his successor was announced within a day, as expected. It's none other than Liam Lawson. Christian Horner revealed what won him the decision against Yuki Tsunoda.
The difference was very minimal, the decision was very close, but ultimately Lawson was chosen because of his better race pace:
"The decision was extremely close because Yuki is a very fast driver. He already has a lot of experience from many seasons, performed exceptionally well in the tire test in Abu Dhabi, and the engineers still praise what they saw there. But 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 there's no denying that Lawson has only 11 races under his belt; he will surely get much better and stronger over time.
He's mentally strong and has a lot of resilience, but the most important thing will be that we don't put too much pressure on him. He has to face the best driver of his generation, but the best thing is for him to completely ignore what's happening with Max Verstappen and focus only on his own task and development. If he does that, he'll succeed!" - said Christian Horner.
