Nothing to do for Liam Lawson. The young AlphaTauri driver, despite his spectacular debut in Formula 1, will not have any seats inside the Circus starting from next season. The Faenza team, in fact, during the Japanese GPhe announced the renewal until next season for both Tsunoda and Daniel Ricciardo, despite only competing in two races this season.
AlphaTauri, in addition to Tsunoda comes the renewal of Ricciardo
The announcement of Ricciardo's renewal has, in a certain respect, shocked the paddock a bit. Not so much for the news itself, but for the timing: Ricciardo has been off the track for about a month and his replacement, Lawson, is achieving incredible results race after race. In fact, they have also arrived in Singapore the first two points of his season, while in Japan the New Zealander finished in eleventh place, ahead of his teammate - and host - Tsunoda.
Ricciardo returns to Qatar? Eddolls denies: “We will still have Lawson”
Although initially there was talk of a concrete possibility of seeing Ricciardo back on track in Qatar – scheduled for next week – during the Japan Jonathan weekend Eddolls, head of race engineers at AlphaTauri, via Motorsport.com Italy announced that for the Australian i recovery times are still long and, for this reason, it will be up to Lawson to drive the AT04 also in the next race week: “Daniel – Eddolls admitted – he is still going through the recovery phase. Before seeing him in the car again, we would have to wait a little longer. We don't want to set deadlines, although the recovery is progressing well. We have some work planned on the simulator before bringing him back and I clearly think that both on our part and on his part there is no rush to return. The worst thing would be to have it come back before it has healed properly and cause problems".
When will you return?
Lawson's performances at the moment are more than positive and for this reason at AlphaTauri Eddolls doesn't want Ricciardo to speed up his recovery time, risking a possible too hasty return: “Credo – admitted the Alpha engineer – and the final decision will be up to Daniel more than us. Who better than himself will be able to tell us how the pain and recovery is going. In fact, I can guarantee that we are not pressuring him to return. At the moment we have a good roster of three drivers, so there's no rush".
