Lawson replaces Vips as Red Bull reserve driver · RaceFans

In brief

Lawson replaces Vips as Red Bull reserve driver

Formula 2 driver Liam Lawson has taken over reserve driver duties for Red Bull following Juri Vips being dropped from the Red Bull junior team.

Vips, who took part in a Friday Practice run for Red Bull at the Spanish Grand Prix, was dropped by Red Bull after he used a racial slur during a live Twitch stream late last month. Vips had been streaming with Lawson at the time of the incident.

With four Red Bull junior drivers in Formula 2 – including championship leader Jehan Daruvala – Red Bull team principal Christian Horner confirmed that Lawson, who races for Carlin, will take over reserve driver duties.

“Liam Lawson steps into that role, obviously following the Juri Vips announcement,” said Horner.

“Jehan is doing a great job and we’re just following his progress with interest, as well as Dennis Hauger as well, all qualifying for super licences. That’s our coverage at this point in time.”

Gasly did not expect to get out of Q1 with current AlphaTauri package

After narrowly failing to get through to Q3, Pierre Gasly said he was expecting to struggle to progress out of the very first phase of qualifying at Silverstone.

“It’s quite sad to say but I’m actually pretty pleased with with 11th because we knew coming here will be extremely tough considering all the high speed corners,” said Gasly.

He said the situation was so bad that AlphaTauri had not anticipated a top 15 start. “Today we were wondering actually if we can get out of Q1, in the end we came close to Q3. So it was quite positive considering where we are at the moment.”

Ocon Q2 exit due to battery issue

After qualifying fifteenth for the British Grand Prix, Esteban Ocon said that his Q2 run had been compromised by a hybrid system failure that saw his car’s battery fail to charge correctly.

“We had a battery related issue, unfortunately,” Ocon admitted. “We missed quite a lot of of power in the last couple laps and I was I was down at 0%, I guess. So, not ideal, unfortunately.”

Ocon said that he did not believe it was an issue his car had suffered before and that “I trust the guys to to find the issue and and get it fixed for tomorrow.”

“We’ve done it [before], starting from the back and coming back into points,” Ocon added. That’s going to be the…