Helmut Marko “absolutely” stands by the decision to drop Liam Lawson for Yuki Tsunoda, despite the Racing Bulls driver surging ahead of Tsunoda in the standings.

Although Lawson was Red Bull’s first choice to partner Max Verstappen in the F1 2025 season, the New Zealander struggled in the second RB21 and, as his head dropped, the team made the call to send him back to Racing Bulls and promote Tsunoda.

Could Red Bull swap drivers again?

The decision hasn’t yielded the success that Red Bull expected.

Tsunoda has scored just seven points in his nine races with Red Bull, and currently sits on a four-race streak without a single top-ten result.

His Grand Prix weekends are coming undone in qualifying as the Japanese driver hasn’t once featured in Q3 in the last five race weekends.

Lawson, meanwhile, is finding his feet after a slow start to his Racing Bulls return. Scoring points in two of the last four races, including a P6 at Red Bull’s home race in Austria, he’s surged ahead of Tsunoda in the Drivers’ Championship with 12 points to Tsunoda’s 10.

Marko, though, has shut down the possibility of Red Bull reverting to its early-season driver line-ups for its two teams.

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“A driver change doesn’t make sense,” Marko told Sky Deutschland, adding that it was the right decision to replace Lawson with Tsunoda.

“Absolutely, because Lawson was also completely exhausted. He needed a few races to recover, now he has defended a sixth place brilliantly against Fernando Alonso with a one-stopper.

“I think he would not have stayed on his feet next to Max either.”

The 82-year-old believes Tsunoda’s biggest problem is a lack of self-confidence, with the driver faltering in key moments when there is pressure to perform.

“Yuki lacks self-confidence,” said Marko. “We have to think about how we can stabilise him so that he performs throughout the weekend, which he partly shows in free practice.

“He had that dangerous crash in Imola. It is now a sum of negative events, but the speed is there. We see that in the practice sessions, but when the pressure is on, that changes.”

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner also weighed in on Tsunoda’s struggles after a “horrible” Austrian Grand Prix finished with the 25-year-old last in the classification, having been lapped twice by the race winner McLaren team-mates.

“Of course, we’ll look to see how we can support him, but there’s a big delta between the two cars,” Horner told the media, including PlanetF1.com.

“Of course, internally, we ask all of those questions that, no doubt, you ask in terms of, why.

“Obviously, the car has evolved over years in a specific direction, but we’ll see if we can help Yuki and rebuild his confidence in Silverstone.”

Tsunoda is out of contract at the end of this season and faces an uncertain future in Formula 1 as Isack Hadjar is already being linked to the F1 2026 Red Bull race seat.

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