It’s been over three decades since a Formula 1 team dropped a driver as hastily as Red Bull got rid of Liam Lawson.
Red Bull has shown their new signing the door just two rounds into the championship. The last driver this happened to was Ivan Capelli back in 1993.
Capelli had been hired by Jordan to be their experienced hand alongside rookie Rubens Barrichello. On the face of it, he was a potentially smart signing, whose previous team was Ferrari, no less.
They hired Capelli after he came close to winning races in Adrian Newey’s superb Marches. But the 1992 Ferrari was a woeful machine and the team dropped Capelli before the year was over. Question marks therefore hung over his pace.
Eddie Jordan, who sadly passed away just last week, entertained hopes of luring Ayrton Senna away from McLaren as 1993 began. But when the thrice-champion re-signed for McLaren, Jordan moved for Capelli.
Jordan was heading into its third season, with its third different engine supplier, and reliability was a persistent problem throughout testing up until it arrived in Kyalami for the season-opener. There more technical trouble cost Capelli practice time, a situation not helped by the FIA suddenly halving the length of practice sessions to 45 minutes.
Capelli qualified 18th, four places behind his inexperienced team mate. Two laps into the race, he spun and demolished the right-rear of his car – a costly error on a day when only five drivers were circulating at the chequered flag.
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If that was bad, it was nothing compared to the disaster which followed at Interlagos. March had withdrawn from the championship, confirming no more than 26 cars would enter each race. Originally, 24 of those were allowed to start, but the teams agreed unanimously to expand the grid to 25, meaning only one driver would not qualify.
That driver was Capelli. A technical problem in first practice stranded him at the far side of the circuit after one lap. In the final qualifying session the next day, plainly struggling with the car’s handling, he ended up three-tenths of a second off Michele Alboreto in 25th place.
Capelli’s failure to qualify, while Barrichello lapped over two seconds faster and claimed 14th on the grid, spelled the end of his time at Jordan and the end of his F1 career. Jordan replaced him with another experienced driver, Thierry Boutsen, for the following round. He, too, failed to see out the season. By the time the year was over, Jordan had run six different drivers.
Others have come and gone from seats in two races or fewer since then, but Capelli remains the last case of a driver being dropped so soon after the start of a season. The likes of Ricardo Zonta (BAR, 1999) and Juan Pablo Montoya (McLaren, 2005) missed the third round due to injury. Others like Jos Verstappen (Benetton, 1994), Mark Blundell (McLaren, 1995), Antonio Giovinazzi (Sauber, 2017) and Nico Hulkenberg (Aston Martin, 2022) started the first two races as substitutes.
Some of F1’s smaller teams have chopped and changed drivers during a season more quickly since then. These were typically one-off substitutes due to injuries or bans. However some drivers were handed one-off appearances, such as Karun Chandhok’s final start at Lotus in 2011 or Andre Lotterer’s single F1 start at Caterham three years later.
The only other driver whose situation was comparable to that of Capelli and Lawson in the intervening period was Luca Badoer during his brief stint at Ferrari in 2009. He was appointed as a substitute for the injured Felipe Massa, and had the opportunity to complete the season for the team, but was dropped due to his under-performance after two races.
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In fairness to Ferrari, Badoer was not only a substitute but not even their first choice. They hoped to tempt Michael Schumacher back from retirement and planned to let him test one of their cars. However testing was tightly restricted at the time and rival teams would not agree to it. Besides which, Schumacher later ruled himself out of a return having sustained a neck injury early in the year.
The team’s choice of Badoer was a surprising one as a decade had passed since their long-serving test driver’s last F1 race start, with Minardi. In his two-race stint for the Scuderia, he proved disastrously uncompetitive.
On his debut for the team at Valencia, Badoer was almost one-and-a-half seconds slower than the next-slowest driver in Q1. He missed the cut for Q2 by two seconds and was two-and-a-half seconds off team mate Kimi Raikkonen. To put that into perspective, in Q1 at Melbourne this year Lawson was 18th ahead of the two Haas drivers, half a second off reaching Q2 and a second slower than his team mate, Max Verstappen.
While Raikkonen reached the podium in third place in Valencia, Badoer was the last driver running, 17th, a lap down. He was last again at Spa-Francorchamps a week later, one minute and 40 seconds behind Raikkonen, who won.
That proved Badoer’s final start: His place was taken by Giancarlo Fisichella, who finished second to Raikkonen at Spa. Lawson can at least console himself with the knowledge that he is still an F1 driver, and has the chance to redeem himself back at his former team after his Red Bull dream fell apart so quickly.
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