After early week speculation that Daniel Ricciardo may be returning this weekend for the Qatar Grand Prix. It has been confirmed today by Alpha Tauri that Liam Lawson will continue to assume the fill in role for the injured Ricciardo. Ricciardo injured his wrist at the Dutch Grand Prix earlier this year. He under went surgery for the damage shortly after but has not yet reached 100% strength to return to racing. In his absence Liam Lawson is making a name for himself. Some may even go as far to say that he deserves a seat in F1 after out performing teammate Yuki Tsunoda multiple times since assuming the mantle 5 races ago.
“Now we move on to Qatar. I’m not sure how we’ll get on there or how the upgrades will work. I think it’s hard to say because where we struggled in Japan was mainly in the high speed, in Sector 1. We still have more to learn about our new package, and I’m not so sure that Qatar is the type of circuit that will suit our car. Learning takes time, and we’ve got more opportunities in Qatar to try and get the most out of it. However, it’s also a Sprint weekend, so at the same time, that makes it quite tricky, especially in my situation. I’ve never driven here, so going into the sprint weekend will be extra tough.
I drove the Qatar track in the simulator at the end of last week. It’s very fast, a very high-speed circuit and quite unique, and I’ve not seen many tracks like it, as there’s only one low-speed corner in the whole track. The rest is just fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh gear, so I think it’s going to be exciting to drive. With only one Free Practice session, we drivers will have to know where to improve because it’ll get faster at night when it’s much cooler, and we need to know exactly how to extract everything out of the car. I’m expecting it to be tougher than the races we’ve just done.”
After scoring points in the last round in Japan it seemed like a natural decision to allow Lawson to continue his good streak of form while Ricciardo recovers.