After Sergio Pérez was sent off, as expected, his successor was named within a day. It's none other than Liam Lawson. Christian Horner revealed what he decided in his favor over Yuki Tsunoda.
The difference was very minimal, the decision was very close, in the end Lawson was the chosen one thanks to his better race pace:
"The decision was incredibly close because Yuki is such a fast driver. He already has a wealth of experience from several seasons, and he performed exceptionally well in the tire test held in Abu Dhabi; the engineers are still raving about what they saw there. But when we compared his data with Liam's, we saw that his was better than Tsunoda's, especially in terms of race pace. Their qualifying results are almost identical, however, there's no denying the fact that Lawson only has 11 races under his belt; surely, with time, he'll get much better and stronger.
He's mentally strong, he has great resilience, but the most important thing will be that we don't put too much pressure on him. He'll have to face the best driver of his generation, but the best thing he can do is completely ignore what's happening with Max Verstappen and focus solely on his own task and development. If he does that, he'll hold his own!" - declared Christian Horner.
