written in March 2022.#

Last year, I’ve seen an incredible potential inside the young Kiwi, Liam Lawson. He’s cool, composed, and smart. Yet, deep within, there are ruthless aggression sealed in the 19 years old, waiting to be unveiled.

Aggression is a sign of a successful driver. It’s not much about the aggressive manouvre itself but it’s more about the reasoning behind the aggression. When a driver got aggressive, it implies how much the driver wanted to win; how desperate they wanted that crown. That’s a powerful trait to have since it would push them into their limit when the time is right.

Of course, aggression also comes with its own risks. While it is a great way to ‘assert dominance’ over your opponents, there are every bit of chance that you could go beyond the limit and likely, broke the rules or crash your own car, and therefore ending your own race for nothing.

Risk assessment is very important. Being aggressive the whole time will not give you always the same benefit. An accurate example might be the 2017-2018 Max Verstappen. At the time, he was constantly pulling aggressive manouvre but it does him more harm than not.

As Verstappen got more matured, he came to understood that aggression is not always the answer. Other times, it is better to be patient and live for another day. This is the discussion about ‘the completeness of a driver’. Completeness has direct correlation with driver experience. And the more they drive, the more experience they tend to have.

An F1 pundit, Martin Brundle often pointed out that Lewis Hamilton is one of the most complete F1 driver, which I fully agreed on. Lewis Hamilton is great at assessing his current situtation, he knows when aggression is required or when to live another day. It is the reason behind his consistency and it is acquired gradually by his ever-increasing experience.

So there are several points: Aggression and Completeness. There are also communication skills and obviously, natural speed.

Communication is simply regarding the way communicate with your team. It has to be understood, that motorsport is a team sport. Driver and engineer need each other, so it’s essential to understand each other’s thoughts. Communication has to be clear and precise. However, there would be some challenges when driver and engineer trying to communicate, that is technical border.

Carlos Sainz Jr. is an example of an excellent driver. He is able to communicate in ‘the same language’ with his engineers and therefore would give him some extra knowledge regarding the car. At the 2021 season, he is the fastest driver to adapt to their new car and no doubt it is because his excellent communication skills combined with his natural speed.

The language Sainz speaks is simply, technical language. Formula 1 is very technical. If a driver wanted to get more comfortable or faster in the car, they’d have to deal with various technical settings which most drivers would likely had no knowledge about. Sainz had those knowledge.

And finally, natural speed. This trait is a tad more abstract to explain but it is visible and easy to spot. Driver with a great natural speed tend to just able to ‘get in the car and drive fast immediately’. Fast drivers are able to identify any car’s traits including the car’s limitations. With that knowledge, fast drivers are usually able to extract the maximum of any car they are driving. This is a common trait of every Formula 1 drivers, although it is surely a requirement to get within the series itself.

Liam Lawson evidently has these traits.

Back in 2021, he’s shown aggression time and time again, most notably when making extraordinary move at Monaco against Piastri, in a place reminiscent of Charles Leclerc. However, he’s also shown his weakness when things get desperate when he made a race-ending move against Kelvin Van Der Linde and Mike Rockenfeller on DTM Nurburgring.

Lawson also has shown maturity. He was under immense pressure of championship fight on DTM though that has almost zero effect on him. He calculate his moves. He didn’t make moves that he didn’t have to, albeit became aggressive when he had to. This is reminiscent of Lewis Hamilton on his championship fight against Max Verstappen.

He is also known to be a great communicator. On his DTM campaign, he was alongside an experienced F1 driver, Alexander Albon. And very quickly to be noticed that Lawson was able to describe his issues with the car on an effective manner to his engineer and together produced a car setup he is happy with. Even to the extent where he almost outqualified and outraced his team mate every single time. This is also perhaps an evident of his natural speed and adaptability.

In spite of all, Liam Lawson’s campaigns last year didn’t do too well. He finished 9th on F2 championship and 2nd on DTM - where he should’ve been a champion.

Lawson was unlucky on F2. He had engine problems which is supposed to be very rare issue on a spec series, he was disqualified from his Monaco victory through no fault of his own, and also involved to several unfortunate car crashes.

His DTM campaign ended under similar story. He was comfortably on the top of championship into the last race. Even scored a very convincing pole position on it. However, his race ended brutally by a reckless manouvre by none other than his championship rival, and then his championship fight cruelly ended by a series of team orders of another team.

This year would be the real challenge for him as he would be focusing on nothing more than Formula 2. He is currently driving for Carlin, a team that is capable of winning races, getting poles, and winning championship. So, here’s a predicition: Liam Lawson will win 2022 Formula 2 and graduated to Formula 1 for next year.

Regardless whether Liam Lawson would win the F2 championship or not, I am pretty sure that the young Kiwi has ticked most of the boxes required to become a Formula 1 driver. Without a doubt, he deserved a seat on the near future.

written in December 2022.#

March 2022, I made a prediction on a certain junior racing driver named Liam Lawson. I wrote that he’d won 2022 Formula Two World Championship and will graduate to Formula One, driving for one of its ten teams next year. Well, here we are at the judgement day, and it all aged like one… fine… milk.

This will be the review of the previously written article. Besides those silly predictions, I also raised few points about characteristics of what makes a great driver. I will read through the article as a different man now and we will see how far (or close) my opinions has evolved. Curious.

Before we proceed, let me just make it clear that these predictions was never about getting it right, rather about having fun with it. That’s why when making predictions, I always go bold. Why not have fun since you have nothing to lose anyway!

The first point I’ve brought was aggression. I said that aggression is a sign of successful driver but risk assessment is also very important.

I still stand by the point. I still think aggression is a defining trait. How successful a driver is defined by how far the driver is willing to take chances and push themselves against the odds. That’s why I said that I saw potential within the Kiwi, Liam Lawson that day. His driving this year, too, is nothing short of a show. Attempting overtakes on places that isn’t supposed to be and taking risks even when he could’ve settled on where he is.

That said, with aggression, there wouldn’t always be a pleasant ending. For example, on Spielberg (Austria) Lawson ate more than he could chew. That is, in a race where he could’ve finished easily with fifteen points, he ended up with sole - a point. He took risks. However, he did many silly things at that race, and even funnier, that fifteen points - which he lost due to carelessness - is all he needed to finish second on the championship which is a way better result than what he ended up with.

Moving on, I raised a second point that is risk assessment. I wrote that aggression is not always the answer because there is every bit of chance that you’d crash to your rival, that sometimes it’s better to be satisfied on where you are and live for another day.

It’s honestly quite obvious but I will elaborate anyway. Firstly, I think the matter of crashing is driver’s problem and it is mostly within their control. Doesn’t matter how much the driver pulls the aggressive trigger - every race, every track, every corner - at the end of the day, it depends on the driver whether they’d crash onto somebody else or not. It’s all about control, car control. If a driver has good enough car control to make a mad looking launch but not ending their own race, then that’s fair passing and nothing’s wrong with that. Oppositely, if they crash; and ended up suiciding their own race or others’, that’s when one driver need to reassess their driving approach.

However, there is more to it. Control is indeed the key but to control, factors need to be predictable. Drivers definitely able to predict their own car and its behavior at a certain moment but drivers couldn’t predict others. On a battle, Verstappen may have thought that Hamilton would concede. Since in the former’s perspective, he had the high ground. But little Verstappen did know that Hamilton actually argued the other way. The collision at Brazil 2022 was caused by this clashing views. One driver never know what others are thinking so sometimes, hesitation is better, so a driver could live on another day. Especially, when they know that they could always strike later.

The next point I raised is so-called ‘completeness’. Now, I think this part of article was pretty messy. I did not define what on earth is completeness and just went on to talk about driver experience instead.

So, let the present me defines completeness. I have a checklist to classify one driver as complete: very quick natural speed (at qualifying and race pace), constant consistencies, and great (wheel-to-wheel) battling skills. Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen, Michael Schumacher are the clear example; they are as complete as a driver could be at the moment. They are fast on qualifying and race, always extracting the maximum of the car, unstoppable at overtaking, while being painfully hard to overtake. Furthermore, they rarely crashed from their own misbehaving, due to their amazing consistencies.

It is perhaps right to consider that completeness has direct correlation to experience. I couldn’t give concrete reasons but it’s just proven by examples. Hamilton as a rookie had problems with aggression, which in as his racing tally increases, have become less of a problem. Likewise, Verstappen couldn’t stop crashing at worse possible times, which as well, became less of a problem with more experience under his belt. In addition, there is also decent percentage of natural talent, which will be a story for another time.

Liam Lawson, in this case, is one of the most complete junior driver. He has way more experiences than typical junior drivers at his age. Formula Four, Toyota Racing Series, Formula Three, Formula Two, and Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters. These are all very different class of series which he has driven on and not to mention, was very competitive on.

The next point, I mentioned something about communications. Now, honestly, I had no flippin’ idea what I was talking about. It goes without saying that communication is important in every line of works. But I didn’t know where I get the idea that Lawson was a great communicator. Maybe, it originated from a praise of one man, which is quite honestly irrelevant especially when it’s a PR work. I jumped into conclusion too quickly, so I’m ignoring this part.

For the closing stages, I evaluated Lawson’s performance the preceding year. So, I might have to do the similar thing here.

Liam Lawson was driving full-time for Carlin at Formula Two. At the first three races, he looked like a title-contender and indeed he was briefly leading the championship. He got three podiums in a row, approaching fourth, except a race-ending pit stop error costed him the record. Afterwards, he lost all the momentum he had and never touched the top again.

Following a series of ups and downs, Lawson ultimately finished third on the championship just ahead of his team mate Logan Sargeant - who went on to graduate into F1 for the next year.

So, what went wrong in his 2022 season? Lawson’s biggest problem is qualifying. Aside of being not consistent enough throughout the year, the bigger problem is that he is also just not fast enough.

Lawson’s teammate, Logan Sargeant, seemed to have the edge over him on qualifying. Sargeant collected two pole positions at Silverstone and Paul Ricard, meanwhile Lawson only ever qualified as high as second one times, at Baku. He qualified mostly around the lower midfield, hence doing his feature race - where most points are awarded - not a good favor.

That said, his race pace was quite an interesting one. Looking at Formula Two statistics, Lawson is the most successful on sprint races; collecting three wins and six podiums. If you merge the sprint race statistics with feature race’s, the champion Felipe Drugovich is indeed on the top of statistics albeit Lawson just stand right below him as second on the tally.

Reviewing his season gave me an insight to Lawson’s bizzare year. Since the start, there was a clear foreshadowing of unluckiness. Starting from the pit stop error, strategical mistakes, unlucky safety car timings, crashes, all happened on him, and even more painful, it happened at the worst possible timing, when he could’ve easily score big points.

With all that said, this isn’t an excuse I state for Liam Lawson. You ask me to give Lawson a rating for his year, then it will not even be a 7/10. Lawson indeed was very unlucky but that is an aspect outside driver’s control. For things he could control, he simply didn’t do a good enough job. That horrible qualifying pace was didn’t do him a favor and consequently he did some questionable and silly things out of frustrations.

Great drivers could overcome any kind of unluckiness by simply do the best on the race where he is fortunate to see chequered flag. Max Verstappen at first phase of 2022 was coincidentally the perfect example. He had 100% winning rate; at the beginning, he had engine problem two times that forced him to not finish albeit on the race he finishes, he won it.

Verstappen always capable of delivering the maximum results regardless of the circumstances. However, the result could only go so far when equipment is not good enough. Before 2021, Verstappen rarely able to match the dominant force of Mercedes because his Red Bull just wasn’t fast enough. And arriving at 2022, he wins 14 times and that is a huge thanks to the Red Bull car masterpiece.

We always have to be reminded that motorsport is ultimately a team sport; a combination of engineers and drivers, so when a driver does not have a good enough result, a blame shouldn’t be laid on one side. It always go two ways.

At the start of the year, each F2 teams determined which approach they will take throughout the year. Carlin - Liam Lawson’s and Logan Sargeant’s team - seemed to have taken an approach where they emphasizes on race pace that consequently costed them their qualifying pace. That is a very important point because even if Lawson was lucky to finish every race this year, he still wouldn’t be able to match the champion, Felipe Drugovich.

Drugovich-MP Motorsport combination outclassed the entire field. It was clearly showcased at Barcelona, where he wins twice, both Sprint and Feature race. Their race pace was fast albeit the more impressive part is their tire management. When everybody else struggles, Drugovich gets faster. He always seemed to have the edge over everybody else in terms of tire understanding. The basic logic is that as the race progresses, drivers’ tire gets destroyed and they got slower and slower. However, that just isn’t the case for Drugovich. That’s why he- they are the deserving champion of 2022 F2.

Last thing to talk about are the present and the future. Where is Liam Lawson now? and where is he going?

After leaving F2, Lawson right now chooses to compete on Japan’s Super Formula for the 2023 season. It is not exactly the best competition for his goal towards F1 because the talent pool on Super Formula wasn’t exactly as packed as F2 - or even F3. However, unironically, the Super Formula spec car is similar to a Formula One car in terms of grip level and it is the closest-to-F1 car a junior driver could ever drive. So, if Lawson could impress with his driving, his chances might be not all too bad.

To maximize his F1 chance, I really think the minimum for Lawson is to at least win the 2023 Super Formula championship. There are some gaijin that has done it, like Nick Cassidy and (almost) Pierre Gasly. Not to mention, he is on the perfect team, which is the reigning constructor champion Mugen Honda. However, for him to win the championship means that he will be facing toe-to-toe with the two times world champion, Tomoki Nojiri. It will be quite challenging.

So, would he win it? Let me get this clear. I have faith on Lawson. I still believed in my theory that he would fit on higher grip car such as Super Formula and Formula 1. And yes, I think Liam Lawson would be the 2023 Super Formula Champion. I also still think that Liam Lawson will be a Formula 1 racing driver and it’s only a matter of time.

Let’s see what the future holds.