Liam Lawson is about to get punished for an engine change he had nothing to do with. Red Bull has fitted new power unit components to the car normally driven by Isack Hadjar, who is sitting out the Italian Grand Prix with a wrist injury, and it’s Lawson who will pay the price on Sunday with a grid penalty.
Parts Belong to the Car, Not the Driver
According to RacingNews365, the new components have gone into Hadjar’s RB22 allocation specifically, not into whichever driver happens to be sitting in the seat that weekend. Lawson is currently deputising for Hadjar, so he’s the one who gets to serve the drop. It’s a quirk of how the regulations track components against chassis allocation rather than the human being strapped into the cockpit, and it means Lawson walks into a penalty for hardware fitted in someone else’s name.
There is at least a silver lining buried in the small print. Because the parts are logged against Hadjar’s allocation and not Lawson’s, the New Zealander won’t face a repeat penalty when Hadjar eventually reclaims his own seat, which RacingNews365 suggests may not happen until after the Spanish Grand Prix. No double jeopardy, just a single dose of misfortune this weekend.
It hasn’t been confirmed exactly which components have been swapped, but Monza is the classic dumping ground for these things. Long straights, heavy braking zones and genuine overtaking chances make it the one circuit on the calendar where teams can absorb a grid drop without it turning into a stone-cold death sentence for the race. Red Bull clearly decided this was the moment to cash in whatever reliability upgrade Hadjar’s side of the garage needed, penalty be damned.
Waché Saw It Coming
This was hardly a shock by Saturday. Red Bull technical director Pierre Waché had already flagged on Friday that Lawson was likely to take the hit, which is why the team ran a noticeably different programme for him during FP2. Lawson wasn’t chasing a clean lap count in the way a driver protecting grid position normally would; he was working through whatever Red Bull needed from that session knowing the grid slot was already compromised.
Lawson isn’t alone in this particular club this weekend. Mercedes has fitted new components to Kimi Antonelli‘s car and Williams has done the same for Alex Albon, so both will also start from the back of the grid on Sunday. Antonelli leads the championship by a distance, so a Monza penalty barely registers as a risk for Mercedes given the car’s pace advantage over most of the field this season. For Red Bull, the calculation is murkier, because Lawson doesn’t have the same luxury of simply carving his way back through in a dominant car.
A Penalty With Someone Else’s Name on It
There’s something faintly absurd about a driver taking a grid penalty for engine parts assigned to a teammate’s stationary car. Lawson was only drafted in because Hadjar picked up a wrist injury during the summer break, and now he’s the one who has to grind through traffic on Sunday because Red Bull decided this was the weekend to burn a fresh component on Hadjar’s chassis. It’s the sort of regulatory footnote that makes complete sense on paper and zero sense to anyone watching the race unfold from the grandstands.
The bigger subplot here is what happens after Monza. Red Bull has a decision to make on how long Lawson keeps the seat, and it isn’t a straightforward one. Former F1 driver Juan Pablo Montoya used his slot on F1 TV’s Weekend Warm-Up to argue Red Bull should hang onto Lawson through the Spanish Grand Prix in Madrid rather than rush Hadjar back the moment he’s fit enough to strap in.
“Yuki showed the speed he had in the race, overtaking people, the aggression. I think everything you wanted to see from a driver. If you look at drivers in F1, he delivered. He did his job. He didn’t make mistakes. He didn’t put a wheel wrong, and it was really good to see.” – Juan Pablo Montoya
Montoya was actually referencing Yuki Tsunoda’s stand-in drive at the Dutch Grand Prix, where Tsunoda filled Lawson’s Racing Bulls seat while Lawson himself moved across to Red Bull for Hadjar. Confusing as that shuffle sounds, the underlying point stood: whoever gets thrown into an unfamiliar car with minimal preparation and still delivers a clean, mistake-free result deserves more than a one-race trial.
“With Liam, if I were Red Bull, especially with Madrid coming up next week, I would say: ‘Hey, let’s be smart. We take a few more weeks of recovery, and we prepare Liam properly for Madrid, because it’s a new circuit for everyone.'” – Juan Pablo Montoya
That Madrid race, the first Spanish Grand Prix to be held at the new Madring circuit, arrives on 11-13 September, and it’s a genuine unknown for the entire grid since nobody has raced there before. Montoya’s argument is that throwing Hadjar back in cold, on a circuit nobody has data for, is a bigger risk than simply letting Lawson finish what he started.
Lawson currently sits ninth in the drivers’ championship on 49 points, just behind Hadjar’s 68 in eighth, with Max Verstappen sixth on 112. None of those numbers get anywhere near Antonelli’s 242-point lead at the top, so this remains a midfield squabble rather than anything resembling a title conversation. But for Red Bull, deciding who sits in that second car alongside Verstappen for Madrid matters more than the odd grid penalty picked up on Hadjar’s behalf at Monza.
Red Bull’s real headache isn’t the penalty itself, it’s the precedent. If a driver can be punished for parts fitted to a car he isn’t even racing, the team needs to think harder about how it manages these substitutions before the next unplanned absence lands on its desk. For more on how Monza’s practice sessions shaped the grid this weekend, read our earlier report on Lawson’s mixed Friday running, and for the full rundown of what else happened on track, catch our Friday recap of the Italian Grand Prix weekend.
