“Highly unlikely” Lawson will replace Perez this year

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner played down, but did not rule out, the possibility of Liam Lawson replacing Sergio Perez at the team this year.

Perez failed to score for the fifth time this season in Mexico. Red Bull were leading the constructors’ championship five races ago but fell to third last weekend.

Red Bull dropped Daniel Ricciardo from their second team RB two rounds ago, replacing him with Lawson, who impressed during a five-race spell as a substitute for the team last year. Lawson scored points on his return in Austin.

Perez endured a conspicuously poor weekend in his home race. He failed to progress beyond Q1 and was penalised for a false start before damaging his car in an incident with Lawson.

But with just four races left this season, Horner indicated he doesn’t envisage replacing Perez with Lawson. “I think it’s highly, highly unlikely,” he told Viaplay. “We’ll sit down and look and try and understand what happened in this race.”

However he admitted Perez had a poor race in front of his home crowd. “He picked up quite a lot of damage and his race was shot at that point,” said Horner. “He picked up a penalty for the start. So definitely a race to forget.”

Perez laid the blame for his poor race at Lawson’s feet. “It was very unfortunate because we were making a lot of progress,” he said. “We were definitely going in the right direction.

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“We were up to P10 already, although with the penalty we had in the beginning. It was looking like good points for the day to minimise the damage but then unfortunately we came together with Lawson and we picked up a massive damage.”

While Perez blamed Lawson for their collision, the stewards only investigated the Red Bull driver for the incident. They cleared him, but Perez believed Lawson should have been penalised.

“To me it’s simple,” said Perez. “He was off the track. I was on the inside into turn four and the only route he had was to cut the corner and go straight, just basically like if there was no one there. That meant that we damaged the both of our races.”

The stewards ruled Perez made a late move which forced Lawson off the track. “It’s not his fault, he’s coming up and he’s just driving without control,” Perez continued. “He did the same to Fernando last weekend, he’s done it to me, he’s done it to Franco at the end of the race and there is no penalty. So it really depends who you are here and to see what sort of penalties you get.”

Perez said he won’t “waste my time” trying to talk to Lawson about their clash: “He doesn’t understand anything.”

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