Red Bull Racing reserve driver and Red Bull Junior Team prospect Liam Lawson hopes to break into Formula 1 as a full-time racing driver in 2024. But to get there, he will take a similar path to the one Pierre Gasly and Stoffel Vandoorne tread not long ago, leaving Formula 2 behind to compete in the Japanese Super Formula Championship.
Super Formula and its predecessor series have served as a waypoint to Formula 1 for many accomplished drivers in the past 50 years, but by no means is this a “junior formula” category like the one Lawson leaves behind. That’s something that the 21-year-old from New Zealand is well aware of.
Lawson said his goals for 2023 is “to eventually be fighting for the title, that’s what everyone’s here to do. I want to be winning races this year. But I think it’s going to be tough, especially early on in the season.”
Racing at unfamiliar tracks, in a brand-new Dallara SF23 chassis which will be quicker than all but the handful of Formula 1 cars he’s sampled as a Red Bull test driver, Lawson will have to match up to a field comprised mainly of true professional factory racing drivers that are paid to race by Toyota and Honda.
“I need to learn as much as possible, I think,” Lawson said. “Fortunately, I’m quite okay at adapting to new cars.”
The SF23 won’t be too dissimilar to the F2/18 chassis that he won five races in across the last two seasons. Any driver of his calibre should relish not only a car that’s lighter and more powerful and with Honda and Toyota supplying their own inline four-cylinder engines, it shouldn’t be as prone to the sort of mechanical failures which have hurt many F2 drivers in recent years.
The SF23 is new for everyone, which should help level the playing field. It has a new aerodynamic profile and some veteran drivers adapted to its characteristics better than others in testing. Lawson backed up his confidence in his own adaptability by finishing 10th-fastest in the two-day official pre-season test at Suzuka in March.
Another thing Lawson is enjoying is the ability to work with a larger crew than the ones he’ll have been used to in the European junior categories – driving for no less than the world-famous Team Mugen, the 2022 teams’ champion. “The [Mugen] team is bigger than what I’m used to working with,” Lawson said after the Suzuka test. “In Formula 2, it’s much more limited numbers, with the staff. And here, there’s quite a lot more people.”
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