Christian Horner has heightened speculation that Liam Lawson could lose his Red Bull seat after just two races by refusing to confirm the New Zealander will drive for the team at the third round of the 2025 Formula 1 season in Japan.

Lawson has endured a dismal start to his Red Bull career, being knocked out at the first stage of all three qualifying sessions (including one in the Sprint format) and also exhibiting a lack of race pace, highlighted by the relative success of his team-mate Max Verstappen.

Red Bull chose to promote Lawson from their junior squad Racing Bulls after just 11 grand prix appearances in two short spells across 2023 and 2024, favouring the 23-year-old over his more experienced former team-mate Yuki Tsunoda.

Autosport reported shortly after Sunday’s Chinese Grand Prix that Red Bull are considering replacing Lawson with Tsunoda as soon as the Japanese driver’s home race, which takes place from April 4-6 in Suzuka.

When asked about it in his own press briefing a couple of hours after the race in China, Red Bull team principal Horner notably opted not to dismiss the report as false.

Horner said: “There’s always going to be speculation in the paddock. As I say, we’ve only just finished the race here. We’ll take away the info and have a good look at it.”

Asked about Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko’s claims that a meeting had been scheduled for next week to discuss the situation, Horner said “nothing specific” had been set up.

Following Lawson’s poor qualifying display on Saturday, in which he struggled to get his tyres into their operating window, Red Bull changed the set-up of his car, breaching parc ferme rules and condemning him to a pit-lane start.

Horner said: “I think Liam’s had a tough couple of races, a tough weekend here. We elected to take him off the grid out of parc ferme to do a significant set-up change and so we’ve managed to get 56 laps of reasonable data from that. Obviously, we’ll take that away, we’ll have a good look at it, and, as a group, we’ll do our best to support him.

“Liam is obviously confidence-wise struggling with the car at the moment, which is why we made some significant changes today to see if we could find a more confidence-inspiring set-up for him.”

‘I feel sorry for Lawson’

While Horner was careful to avoid making any definitive statements during the briefing, some of his remarks about Lawson’s struggles pointed towards major concern within the team.

Horner said: “I think Liam still has got potential, we’re just not realising that at the moment. I think the problem for him is, he’s had a couple of really tough weekends, he’s got all the media on his back.

“The pressure just naturally grows in this business, and I feel very sorry for him. You can see it’s very tough on him at the moment.

“He’s a young guy, we’ve got a duty to look after him and we’re going to do the best that we can to support him.

“Liam’s still a very capable driver. We know that, just for whatever reason, we’re not seeing him able to deliver that at the moment.”

The opening two races of the season have come at circuits Lawson had not previously competed at, but Horner appeared to dismiss that as an excuse for his struggles.

He said: “I think these guys, they get up to speed pretty quickly. We’ll just continue to evaluate it. We’ve got a stack of data to go and have a look at. That’s what we’ll do.”

Tsunoda in line for belated call-up?

Tsunoda has publicly expressed his frustration at being overlooked for a promotion, but has let his driving do the talking in the early stages of the season.

While some extreme misfortune saw him miss out on points in each of the first two grands prix, he has qualified well and scored an impressive sixth-placed finish in the Shanghai Sprint on Saturday.

Asked about Tsunoda’s start to the season, Horner said: “Yuki is an experienced driver now doing a great job. He was unlucky, from what I can see from the race plots, with strategy and a front-wing issue today. But again, last weekend he was doing a good job.”

Tsunoda had the opportunity to drive Verstappen’s 2024 drivers’ title winning RB20 in an end-of-season test at Abu Dhabi last year, but it was widely reported that Red Bull had already all but decided to replace the departing Sergio Perez with Lawson.

Horner was asked whether Tsunoda’s performance in that test would be more useful than his Racing Bulls form in understanding whether he would better cope with the Red Bull than Lawson has done so far.

He said: “You look at the information, you look at the data, and at the end there’s 400 engineers in our team that are all trawling through the 600 sensors that are on the car, so there’s an awful lot of information that we have.

“Yuki did a test for us, he tested very well. It’s a useful data set, but that’s all it is. You have to look always at the broader picture.”

Formula 1 heads to the iconic Suzuka Circuit for the Japanese Grand Prix on April 4-6, live on Sky Sports F1. Stream Sky Sports with NOW – No contract, cancel anytime