A lost tow and a troubled car sum up Racing Bulls' rough Friday in Baku
Friday's qualifying in Baku brought little to celebrate for Racing Bulls. Both cars went out in Q2, Liam Lawson P12 and Arvid Lindblad P15, in a session where the smallest of margins decided who carried on and who didn't.
For Lawson, the frustration was less about the car's underlying pace than about one specific moment. "We've just honestly been slow this weekend," he said, "but we did make a step for quali, which was good." The lap itself, he explained, had genuine promise. "The lap was really, really good up until turn 16." Changeable conditions hadn't helped - "we've had different wind every single lap this weekend" - but the bigger issue was a straightforward one: no tow.
He had tried to engineer one by running close to Max Verstappen, only for it to backfire. "I tried to start sort of semi-close to Max, but his out-lap was too quick, and he's also quicker than us, so by the end of the lap he pulled away and I basically was just punching a hole in the air." The result was painful to watch unfold in real time. "Super frustrating when you're watching your delta just climb and lose all the time that you've made up." As he put it bluntly, that single moment was "the difference between making it through and not making it."
Looking ahead to Saturday, he was already thinking in terms of damage limitation - overtaking would be hard, energy management harder still, and running out of battery before turn 16 would spell trouble. The tyres, at least, had looked reasonable on Friday, though he wasn't ready to draw conclusions until race day.
Lindblad's weekend had been harder still, and he did not try to dress it up. "The whole weekend's just not been particularly fun," he said. "It's been a challenge for all of us and we've all been working hard."
Part of it, he admitted, was of his own making, after a crash the previous day cost him running in both morning sessions and left him in a different car to Lawson's for the rest of the weekend. From there, the problems compounded. "Struggled a lot in braking, I think that's the biggest thing," he said, describing inconsistency that shifted "every corner, every lap" alongside power unit issues that made the car harder still to read.
On a street circuit with zero margin for error, and having crashed twice in as many weeks, he was candid about the toll it had taken on his confidence to commit fully to a lap. Asked what Saturday might hold, he was equally unvarnished: with no long runs completed all weekend, and Racing Bulls typically weaker in race trim than in qualifying, a below-par Friday did not bode well. He and Lawson would fight the cars around them, he said, but going forward through the field looked unlikely.
It left Racing Bulls with a Friday that offered little encouragement heading into Saturday - one driver undone by a single missing tow, the other still trying to rebuild both a car and his confidence after a difficult few weeks.
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