Seventeen months after Red Bull removed him from the car after two races, Liam Lawson is Max Verstappen's team-mate again. The reason is a broken wrist.
Isack Hadjar was ruled out of this weekend's Dutch Grand Prix on Wednesday. Red Bull kept the announcement short.
"Oracle Red Bull Racing driver Isack Hadjar has sustained a wrist injury during the summer shutdown that will prevent him from racing at the 2026 Dutch Grand Prix," the team said. "We will be welcoming back Liam Lawson who will replace him in the RB22 this weekend. The team wishes Isack a speedy recovery and thanks Liam for stepping in on short notice."
Sky Sports News understands the injury is a fracture, picked up during boxing drills involving a sand bag. Hadjar trains that way regularly. Monza, on September 4-6, gives him another fortnight.
The change cascades down. Racing Bulls confirmed that "Reserve Driver Yuki Tsunoda, will race for Racing Bulls in Zandvoort this weekend, alongside Arvid Lindblad," thanking both drivers for their adaptability.
Jake Nichol of RacingNews365 flagged the record involved. Lawson becomes the first driver dropped from the senior Red Bull seat to earn his way back into it. Gasly, Albon, Perez and Tsunoda never did.
That is where agreement ends.
Edd Straw of The Race treated the selection as the obvious one. With the 2026 power units demanding fluency in energy harvesting and deployment, he argued, Red Bull needed race sharpness above all, and Lawson had it. Straw also thought Tsunoda gains from the swap, landing in what he called the class of the midfield, in the team where he has always looked best.
Gary Anderson called it a debt being repaid. "He didn't get a real chance when he joined Red Bull before, so this is a second opportunity to show his real talent," he said. "Not many get that so he needs to make it count." Promoting Lindblad, in his view, would have loaded too much on a rookie still ironing out small errors.
Josh Suttill took the opposite position. Lindblad has averaged a tenth off Lawson in qualifying and beaten him outright at circuits including Spa, and Suttill saw a free chance to test the 19-year-old against Verstappen wasted. "Red Bull is all about taking big swings, after all. I wonder if this is the first sign that the new regime has moved away from that," he wrote, citing Ferrari's use of Oliver Bearman in Jeddah and Mercedes handing George Russell the Sakhir drive.
Jack Benyon read the weekend as being about Tsunoda instead. With Felix Rosenqvist off to McLaren, a Meyer Shank Racing IndyCar seat has opened up and Tsunoda has been linked to it. Benyon believes that if the switch happens, Tsunoda's F1 career is finished, which makes one race in a competitive midfield car unusually loaded.
For Lawson, Matt Beer set the bar. That first Red Bull stint was short and bad enough to shadow everything since, even a season that has him ninth on 43 points, sixth in Monaco and at Silverstone, and the leading driver from outside the big four teams.
"Get somewhere near Verstappen, or match what Hadjar's been doing despite being new to the car, and Lawson could change his storyline considerably," Beer said.
The last New Zealander on an F1 podium was Denny Hulme, second in Austria in 1974.