How Many Drivers Have Fallen Victim to the Curse of the Red Bull Second Seat?

At last season’s Chinese Grand Prix, Red Bull’s second driver Liam Lawson qualified dead last. Not only that, but the Kiwi brought up the rear in every single session across the entire weekend. Sprint qualifying, Grand Prix qualifying, the lot. Two races into the opportunity he had spent his entire junior career chasing, and the timing screens were telling a story he couldn’t rewrite. 

Eighteen months earlier, in Singapore, that same driver had knocked Max Verstappen out in Q2 — bumped the four-time world champion in qualifying, sent the paddock briefly electric with the idea that someone from the Red Bull programme might actually be different. Instead, that weekend in Shanghai ended Lawson’s Red Bull career before it ever truly got going; the axe swung without a second thought. 

Isack Hadjar Takes Over 

Yuko Tsunoda has since been and gone, and now Isack Hadjar finds himself in the supposed “cursed” seat. The youngest driver on the 2026 grid, carrying the freshest credentials Red Bull has ever promoted, and the Frenchman proved in his rookie year with the Racing Bulls sister team that he is more than worthy. Unfortunately, however, unlike his predecessors, this year’s machinery is lagging well behind the leading pack. 

This year, it’s Mercedes that the bookies make the favourites to win the Constructor’s Championship, and rightfully so. The Silver Arrows have romped to victory in each of the opening three races, with George Russell winning the curtain raiser in Australia before teenage teammate Kimi Antonelli took the chequered flag in both China and Japan. As such, the latest Formula 1 betting odds make Toto Wolff’s team the odds-on 2/13 favourite to claim the team crown this year, while Red Bull are way out at 50/1. 

Hadjar will simply be hoping to impress this season, rather than making a genuine championship challenge. Hopefully, he can avoid falling to the same fate as the six that have come before him in Red Bull’s second seat next to Max Verstappen. 

Daniel Ricciardo 

The revolving door began, improbably, with excellence. Daniel Ricciardo’s first Red Bull chapter — 2014 to 2018 — was spectacular. He outperformed four-time World Champion Sebastian Vettel in his first season with the team, winning three races to the German’s none. However, Verstappen’s arrival two years into his spell saw tensions rise. 

The Honey Badger picked up seven race victories throughout his time alongside the Dutch sensation, proving he was a driver who made Verstappen look beatable and occasionally look ordinary. However, with both men wanting to be the lead driver, the tensions boiled over, resulting in the pair colliding in Azerbaijan in 2018, a clash which spelled the beginning of the end. 

Ricciardo left for Renault in a bid to lead the iconic champions back to former glories, leaving behind a vacancy that would ultimately snowball into the curse it is today. When he returned years later, both Formula One and the sporting world as a whole were much different. As the below combat sports podcast suggests, further changes are set to come in many different niches. 

Ricciardo was still a seven-time Red Bull race winner, but his stock had declined so much that he was reduced to auditioning for his old seat through AlphaTauri. After being outscored 12 points to 22 by Tsunoda across their shared 2024 campaign, Red Bull pulled the plug, with Ricciardo saying he was “grateful” they made the decision for him. 

Pierre Gasly 

Pierre Gasly went in next, promoted after just 26 Formula 1 starts and thrown, entirely underprepared, into the deep end of the sport’s most demanding environment. The 0.592-second average qualifying gap and the 4.4 positions behind Verstappen in races are numbers — but what they actually represent is a driver being psychologically dismantled over twelve races in full public view, with no apparent support structure and a car he couldn’t read. 

“There was no support,” he said after being dismissed halfway through the season, and that line deserves to sit alone. Twelve races. Demoted. And here is the bitter irony that the sport will never quite resolve: twelve months after his Red Bull exit, Gasly won at Monza in the car that should never have needed to host him at all. The victory that should have been his Red Bull moment happened at AlphaTauri instead, because Red Bull gave up on him before he gave up on himself. 

Alexander Albon 

Alexander Albon replaced Gasly and immediately looked more composed — better racecraft, stronger temperament, a 2.36 average positions behind Verstappen in races during his initial half-season compared to Gasly’s 4.40. He was retained for 2020. And then the RB16 happened. Notoriously difficult, nervously balanced, a car that punished anyone who couldn’t feel its particular corner-entry demands through some preternatural fingertip sensitivity that Verstappen has, and other drivers simply don’t. 

But Albon gave this saga its most technically illuminating observation. Drivers promoted from Racing Bulls, he suggested, were structurally set up to fail — because the junior car runs forgiving, stable, and predictable, a platform designed to develop confidence rather than extract maximum performance from an unforgiving aerodynamic window. The Red Bull is the opposite. It’s designed to get the best out of Verstappen, everyone else be damned. And be damned, each and every one of his teammates has.

Sergio Perez

Make no mistake: Sergio Perez was brilliant, for a while. Two near-perfect seasons, a critical 2021 contribution to Verstappen’s first title, wins in Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan in early 2023, a moment in spring that year where the standings briefly suggested a title fight between teammates. Then Spain 2023. Something broke in the car’s cooperation, in the team dynamic, in the fragile ecosystem of confidence that a racing driver needs to function. 

His 2024 qualifying average deteriorated to 0.762 seconds off Verstappen while the environment reportedly grew hostile and the points gap became grotesque: 152 to Verstappen’s 437. Perez watched himself lose grip on something he’d once held and couldn’t work out why. On his way out, he said what no driver still employed would ever dare say — that “no driver can survive” in that environment, that being alongside Verstappen is “something people don’t understand.”  

Liam Lawson 

Back to Lawson in Shanghai, because two races deserve proper accounting. The Red Bull hierarchy acted ruthlessly in the days after Shanghai, demoting the Kiwi back to the Racing Bulls and swapping him with Tsunoda for his home race in Japan. Verstappen publicly stated he disagreed. Horner suggested the call hadn’t been his. Paddock sympathy was near-universal. The result was the same. 

Yuki Tsunoda 

And finally, we have Tsunoda. Four years of solid consistency at Racing Bulls suggested that he was surely the man who had been groomed for the job. When he was passed over for Lawson, the paddock thought that it was a mistake. When that mistake was rectified within two races, surely the seat next to Verstappen had finally found its long-term occupant, right? Wrong. 

By his own admission, the opportunity “broke him.” Ten Q1 eliminations across his 22 Red Bull races. Nine further Q2 exits. Thirty points across the season, Verstappen scored 385 and missed out on the title by two points. One was a championship contender, the other a back marker. There was no way to justify him remaining in a job, and he was duly demoted. Now Hadjar hopes to fare better.