Liam Lawson Faces Dilemma at Interlagos Amid Weather Uncertainty

Liam Lawson and Racing Bulls are walking a tightrope at Interlagos. The stopwatch says one thing, the sky threatens another.

The New Zealander ended Friday with a mixed picture: 10th in FP1, then shuffled back to 13th in FP2, this time behind team-mate Arvid Lindblad. The team had pushed the VCARB03 in a new set-up direction, searching for something extra. What they found instead was understeer. A lot of it.

The problem is simple to describe and awkward to solve. Rain is expected for Sunday’s São Paulo Grand Prix. Under current rules, the car set-up used in qualifying must be carried into the race. So the ideal configuration for a cool, dry FP3 and qualifying session might be completely wrong once the clouds burst on Sunday.

Lawson laid out the bind after climbing from the car.

"We started a little bit stronger this morning, and then we tried something that didn't really work in FP2, and when it got a lot colder, the stuff we changed was in the opposite direction to that, so it didn't really help," he said. The verdict on that experiment was blunt: "We'll probably go back on that."

FP1, by contrast, offered a glimpse of a more cooperative car. "I think we had a better car [in FP1], so we'll try to start with something similar [in FP3]," Lawson added, before immediately circling back to the dark clouds on the horizon. "Then we'll see what happens with the weather because it is probably going to rain."

So Racing Bulls sit in the classic Interlagos dilemma: commit to a sharper, more aggressive dry set-up for qualifying glory, or compromise now to survive – and maybe thrive – in the wet.

The cold only sharpened the difficulty. Tyre preparation around this short, punchy lap is already unforgiving; drop a few degrees of track temperature and it becomes brutal.

"Putting the lap together and basically doing a good job, I think it's very, very tough here," Lawson admitted. The warm-up window is tiny. "For the tyres, the laps are really short for warm-up, so we're struggling to get everything properly ready for Turn 1."

That first corner, a heavy downhill braking zone after the long run from the pit straight, can make or break a lap. Any hesitation, any fraction of a degree missing from the tyre temperature, and the time bleeds away. Then there’s the traffic.

"Any traffic queuing in the pit lane on track can really, really affect Turn 1," Lawson said, already looking ahead to the chaos of the opening qualifying segment. "So it's going to be interesting, especially Q1 when everybody's on track together. But I mean, the bigger question mark is going to be the rain."

The second session underlined how quickly things can unravel when the balance goes missing. Asked whether the more promising FP1 baseline could anchor their weekend, Lawson didn’t hesitate.

"I think we're pretty surprised by how much of an effect what we changed had because the car was probably one of the worst balances we've had this season, or at least in the recent races in FP2," he said. The combination of cooler asphalt and the new direction left the VCARB03 pushing wide, refusing to rotate. "A big factor is that when the track temperature comes down, we just had so much understeer in the car, so we'll try and revert on that [for Saturday]."

Reverting, though, doesn’t mean ripping everything up. The looming weather keeps them honest.

"But obviously, we can't change anything drastically because if it rains, you need to have a good car in the rain as well."

So Racing Bulls head into Saturday trying to thread the needle: recover the confidence of FP1, tame the understeer of FP2, and still leave enough flexibility in the car to fight when the Brazilian storm finally hits.