April 5, 2025 • 16 mins
Liam Lawson has out-qualified stablemate Yuki Tsunoda to start 13th in tonight's Formula One Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka.
Just over a week after Red Bull made the decision to swap the two drivers, Lawson’s best time was point zero 94 seconds quicker than Tsunoda, who will start 14th.
Former F1 driver David Coulthard joined Piney to discuss.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Weekend Sport podcast with Jason Vine
from Newstalk ZEDB.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Liam Lawson has out qualified at stable mate Yuki Sonoda
for tonight's Formula One Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
This is a better showing from Lawson, who would dearly
love to put his racing balls into the top tend
at the expense of the Red Bull of Yuki Sonoda,
which was his car last time out. Lawson does go
top ten and does go ahead of Yuki Sonoda. Yuki
SODA's first qualifying then for the Japanese Grand Prix as
a Red Bull driver ends in disappointment. Out in Q two,
(00:42):
Liam Lawson just ahead of him. What a baffle that
could be between the two drivers in tomorrow's race here.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
So Lawson and Sonoda will start thirteenth and fourteenth respectively,
just over a week after Red Bull made the decision
to swap the two drivers. Liam Lawson's best time was
point zero nine to four seconds quicker than Sonoda. Both
though eliminated in the second qualifying session with only the
top ten going through to the final qualifying session, and
both Lawson and Sonoda later promoted a spot following a
(01:13):
penalty to Carlos signs, so they were initially fourteenth and fifteenth.
They'll start thirteenth and fourteenth meantime. Red Ball number one
Max for Stappin will start from pole again after setting
a new track lap record in qualifying. He flew around
the track last night. McLaren's Lando Norris will start alongside
the Stappan on the front row. Fellow McLaren driver Oscar
(01:36):
Piastre and ferraris Charlie Kerr third and fourth. It is
a huge pleasure to welcome Formula one Royalty to Weekend Sport.
David Coultart MBE competed in Formula one from nineteen ninety
four to two thousand and eight with Williams, then McLaren
and Latteralie red Ball. He was runner up in the
Formula one World Drivers Championship in two thousand and one
(01:58):
with McLaren and won thirteen Grand Prix across fifteen seasons.
He is now a highly respected F one Common Tighter
and Red Bull ambassador and he joins us now. David,
thank you so much for taking the time to join
us on Weekend Sport here across New Zealand. Can we
start with Max the step and that incredible qualifying lap. Yeesterda,
I want to change us. How does he go so fast?
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Yeah, unbelievable. You know, I'm not actually in Suzuka this
weekend as I only attend sixteen of the Grand Prix,
so I'm a good old fashioned fan this weekend, just
watching on the television and I just you know, that
is why I love Formula and that is what I
love when I was a kid growing up, you know,
seeing your favorite driver or seeing someone just do something
(02:43):
remarkable and really special. And there's no question that that
was you know, y Max is a generational talent. That
car is clearly quick, otherwise it couldn't be on pool.
But he's he's certainly had to work his magic behind
the wheel to deliver the lab.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Put us on the site, David with him if if
you can. What is it that he does so well?
Speaker 4 (03:08):
I think his senses are on such a high level
that he feels the car moving before mere mortals would realize.
And of course all Formula One drivers are good, they're
all extreme talents. But in any elite sport you're looking
for the exceptional talents, and whether it's football, whether it's
(03:29):
you know tennis, whether it's Formula one, there's always two
or three guys at any given time that do things
and you go, I don't know how they did that,
And the truth is they probably don't know how they
did it. It's just so innate in their their their
the psyche, their their ability to feel adhesion. He's he's
(03:50):
clearly got a very very sensitive seat of his pants
and fingertips on the steering wheel.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
What a great way of describing at Lando norisskops three
two and three. Does McLaren same significantly quickly? Not have
a step and you know in any cap probably drives
it fast, but doesn't the Clarence seems significantly quicker to you.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Yeah, I think the way McLaren are able to top
the times pretty much in every session shows that that
is the car. That is the sort of car for
the varying conditions that we're seeing over the first three
Grand Priise. Whether it remains the car, of course, it
depends on the development profile that McLaren are able to
(04:30):
say on. That's what brought them into contention last year
that they found correlation between their upgrades in Virtual World
that enabled them to build them put them on the
car and it delivered lap time in the real world
and that's you know, without getting overlaid Techi. That is
forever the challenge for these Formula One teams because you know,
you can't just sort of put the regulations into an
(04:53):
AI design tool, otherwise they'd all pop out the same
and they'd all be as quick as each other. You know,
there's different opinions as to how to exploit those regulations.
There's different ways of laying up the camp, the carbon
fiber which allows it to flex and bend and all
of that sort of good stuff that hardcore fans will
be following. But right now McLaren is the car rebel
(05:14):
clearly in the hands of Max can be as quick
as him, and today I think that's one of those
moments where remember where you were when you saw Max
get pole position in Suzuka.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Well, Liam Lawson, of course, Amen, I know you've been
following with interest as where you have. What's been happening
over the first two or three Grand Prix. He got
out of Q one qualified fourteenth on the groat. How
much confidence will he take from then?
Speaker 4 (05:36):
Yeah, it was an important weekend for him to rebuild
after what was very very difficult first to Grand Prix,
and he won't be happy, because you're only happy when
you're you know, a little bit ahead of your teammate,
that is your benchmark at the end of the day.
But he will be let's say, a little bit of
pressure has been released. He's back in an environment, he
(05:57):
knows the team well. They've done a great effort to
welcome him home, welcome him back into that team. And
of course he will be validated in his difficult in
the first two races by going, well, look, Yuki was
further up the grid in this car and he's now
behind me. So there'll be a lot of those sort
of box ticking exercises. But when you take away that emotion,
(06:17):
when you take away that you know what sort of
parenting desire to put your arm around the shoulders of
these guys. This is formula one. And when you take
away all the opinion and you take away all the emotion,
you're left with data. And that data is called a stopwatch,
and that stopwatch doesn't lie. So I think Liam can
(06:40):
feel good. I think there's a great building block for
him going forward, big opportunity again tomorrow to see if
he can bring the car home and the points. I
believe in Liam. I think he's a talent. I think he,
you know, just didn't quite get himself up to speed
quickly enough within the red Bulls scenario. But this is
his opportunity to rebuild.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
What about Yuki Sonada, David, He's qualified fifteenth car is
very difficult to drive. Liam had trouble in it Uki
fifteenth today. How do you predict he will go in
that car?
Speaker 4 (07:16):
Yeah, he will be disappointed, of course, because he was
within a few tenths of Max through the clean free practices,
which I think that's all that's really expected. If anyone
is matching Max consistently, you know you found the next
super talent, haven't you. You know? But whether you're a
maxi Astappen fan or not, this isn't about putting your
favorite cap on. This is just about dealing with the facts.
(07:38):
You know, Max is a generational talent, and for Uk
or any of Max's teammates, it's about being within a
few tens and if you can be within a few tens,
then you're you're doing a great job. The difficulty, of course,
that anyone in that car right now is having Formula
one is so incredibly close. If you're half a second
or more away, you're outside the top ten. You're therefore
(08:02):
in a difficult situation to make strategy work to find
points in the Grand Prix itself.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
I looked at your career, David the Third, in your
first full season with Williams Rainow in ninety five, I podiums,
including you mine in Grand Prix win in Portugal. How
did you come to terms with the car so quickly?
Speaker 4 (08:24):
But I was doing a filming for F one TV
recently called Memory Box, and they were taking me through
that sort of ninety four, the tragedy of Senna and
Ratzenberger sharing the carbonage of Mansel ninety five. As you mentioned,
my first cool season, I was a puppy and I
peed on the carpet a left, right, and center. I
(08:44):
made so many mistakes it's embarassing looking back. What saved
me was I had underlying pace in that I could
drive the car quickly and I felt comfortable within the
Williams team. Could have been the test driver for a
few years. But if I you know, if we had
the gift to be able to do it all again,
I would need to grow up. I would need to
(09:06):
get my brain into a to a space where you
are a full professional rather than just you know, wide
eyed and bushy tailed and just being reactive. So the
way I always feel i've been dealing with pressure is
pressure is when you feel you're losing control of a situation.
Pressure is not other people's expectations. And I say that
(09:28):
when I do my commentary, when people would ask, oh, god,
the driver's under so much pressure, and I go, well,
is he does he feel he's not in control? Does
he feel he's you know, his destiny is out of
his hands. If the answer is yes and yeah, I
suspect he does feel pressure. But if he feels yep,
this is my moment, let me go and show what
(09:49):
I can do. Then, irrespective of what the outside world thinks,
if that is the driver's mindset, I don't think they
feel pressure because we've been doing this since we were kids.
You know. None of these guys just arrived last week
and decided, Hey, I'm going to be a grand free driver.
They have been through a roller coaster of you know,
when losing, mistakes, arguments, you know, all of those things
(10:11):
since they were kids.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
So you did you then? Did it take any time
at all? For you to feel comfortable in the car.
Did you ever feel comfortable in a machine like that
or was that just not possible?
Speaker 4 (10:25):
I understand the question in terms of how maybe people
would perceive comfort. A Grand Prix car is not a
comfortable place. It starts with it's not comfortable to sit in,
it's not comfortable to drive, and when the car is
trying to spit you into the wall, it's not a
comfortable feeling. My experience is fast cars are difficult to drive,
(10:50):
and that penny dropped when I went from the ninety
five Williams, which was a Grand Prix winning car, to
the ninety five McLaren, which had been a really average
car during that season. I tested it at the end
of the ninety five season and prior to me joining
McLaren in ninety six, and I was really worried because
I thought, this car is like two seconds slower. This
is going to be frightening to drive. And I went
(11:12):
out and it was like a limousine. And the reason
it was like a limousine it didn't have the downforce,
it didn't have the group to take the tires to
the limit of their adhesion, and you know the same compound,
and the same construction of tires on the Williams was
going two seconds quicker, So you can imagine they had
a lot more load going through them, a lot more
(11:33):
energy going through them. They were a lot more taken
to the limit of what those tires could actually handle.
So fast cars are difficult and uncomfortable. Slow cars the
drivers always think, yeah, give me a quick car and
I'll show you what I can do. Well, give them
a quick car. Sometimes they go, oh, this is a
bit difficult to drive. Why is it not easier? So
(11:54):
if you just think about it going I've never climbed Everest,
but I imagine getting to the top of Everest must be
pretty uncomfortable. Well, my old teammate Mark Webers says, being
in Formula one at the highest level is like getting
to the top of Everest and then taking the oxygen
mask off. I love that.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
We had Mike on the show a couple of weeks
ago and it was it was as articulate as you are.
You saw the chicken flag thirteen times. What is that like?
Speaker 4 (12:23):
It's a wonderful feeling of achievement. And I again, having
gone down the old memory box filming last week, I
remember i'd see the checker flag, I keep my foot
absolutely nailed until I was well across the line. I
would then have to ask the team, can you confirm
I won the race? Because I always had this fear
that I was in some kind of dream. And you know,
(12:46):
I've seen drivers lose races by lifting off and celebrating
before the checker flag and things like that. You see
it in running races, and I never wanted to be
one of those guys. So yeah, it seems what I
did two D two hundred and forty or Grand Prix
and only one thirteen of them. The reality is a
Lewis Hamilton, who's the most winning driver in the history
(13:07):
of our sport, he's only one twenty odd percent of
the races he's entered. We do a lot of losing.
It is a horrible statistic. If you were a boxer
or if you were a fund manager, you know, imagine
if you were only winning twenty odd percent of the
time in those businesses. But that's just the nature of
our sport. It's a privilege, though, to be in Formula one,
(13:29):
to work at that level with the incredible men and
women that design and build these cars, and to then
steer it on their behalf to the checker flag. Is
a wonderful feeling of achievement.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Amazing. Can we just circle back to Liam to finish? David,
I mean, we love him, but we're biased. Of course,
he's one of ours. You're alluded to it before when
you said you do say promising things in his future.
Can you maybe just expand on that. How do you
write him as a driver? What do you predict the
Liam Lawson?
Speaker 4 (13:58):
Well, I hope very much that this little hiccup is
kind of what we saw with Alex Albon, where Alex
had a tricky year, relatively young at the time, not
a lot of experience and kind of struggle to pull
the whole season together. And again, like my ninety five season,
although I finished third, it was there was a much
(14:19):
bigger gap in the performance of the cars in those days,
so I was in a very privileged position. Formula One
today is so close that these guys have to be
at a higher level. They are at a higher level.
The next generation is always better. So you know, let's
start with the fact that Liam is a much better
race driver than I ever was, but he races in
a time which which is much much more competitive. He's
(14:42):
got to Formula one on merit, on talent. He's growing
up in the public eye because no matter how mature
and how you know, worldly he thinks he is, stick
him in five years in the same situation. He's just
going to be more mature. You know, you can't stick
an old head on young shoulders, much as we would
have loved that. And he has got to grow up
(15:05):
in the public whilst continuing to follow his dream of
becoming a Formula and world champion. I believe all of
those things that brought him to Formula one are still there.
He's got over the first hurdle, which every driver has
hurdles in their life, and he's now can take a
breath and go and show that he can bring points
(15:26):
home for racing bulls. His next goal has to be
to be team leader, so he's got to get in
front of Haja and if he does that, he's back
on track. If he's consistently a little bit behind Hadja
for whatever reason, whatever excuses anyone wants to pull out
the stopwatch tells us the running order, then he's got
to have tried absolutely everything to overcome that. And only
(15:49):
when he's tried absolutely everything. Can he just accept his
place in this world, which if he finishes up as
merely one of the very you know, talented race drivers
that are lucky enough to be in Formula one, that's
still a pretty good place to be in New Zealand.
Can be proud. But I still believe there's there's a
enough promise there for him to work this out and
(16:09):
make his way back to a winning situation.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
David, it's been such a pleasure and on education having
you join us across New Zealand. Thanks so much for
lending us your expertise. We like you will watch Liam's
progress with interest. Again, thank you for your time this afternoon.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
Thank you very much, Thank you, David.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
David Coultart MBA. What a what a superban site into
one of the toughest sports on the Plannet.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
For more from Weekend Sport with Jason Fine, listen live
to News Talks ed b weekends from midday or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Weekend Sport podcast with Jason Vine
from Newstalk ZEDB.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Liam Lawson has out qualified at stable mate Yuki Sonoda
for tonight's Formula One Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
This is a better showing from Lawson, who would dearly
love to put his racing balls into the top tend
at the expense of the Red Bull of Yuki Sonoda,
which was his car last time out. Lawson does go
top ten and does go ahead of Yuki Sonoda. Yuki
SODA's first qualifying then for the Japanese Grand Prix as
a Red Bull driver ends in disappointment. Out in Q two,
(00:42):
Liam Lawson just ahead of him. What a baffle that
could be between the two drivers in tomorrow's race here.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
So Lawson and Sonoda will start thirteenth and fourteenth respectively,
just over a week after Red Bull made the decision
to swap the two drivers. Liam Lawson's best time was
point zero nine to four seconds quicker than Sonoda. Both
though eliminated in the second qualifying session with only the
top ten going through to the final qualifying session, and
both Lawson and Sonoda later promoted a spot following a
(01:13):
penalty to Carlos signs, so they were initially fourteenth and fifteenth.
They'll start thirteenth and fourteenth meantime. Red Ball number one
Max for Stappin will start from pole again after setting
a new track lap record in qualifying. He flew around
the track last night. McLaren's Lando Norris will start alongside
the Stappan on the front row. Fellow McLaren driver Oscar
(01:36):
Piastre and ferraris Charlie Kerr third and fourth. It is
a huge pleasure to welcome Formula one Royalty to Weekend Sport.
David Coultart MBE competed in Formula one from nineteen ninety
four to two thousand and eight with Williams, then McLaren
and Latteralie red Ball. He was runner up in the
Formula one World Drivers Championship in two thousand and one
(01:58):
with McLaren and won thirteen Grand Prix across fifteen seasons.
He is now a highly respected F one Common Tighter
and Red Bull ambassador and he joins us now. David,
thank you so much for taking the time to join
us on Weekend Sport here across New Zealand. Can we
start with Max the step and that incredible qualifying lap. Yeesterda,
I want to change us. How does he go so fast?
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Yeah, unbelievable. You know, I'm not actually in Suzuka this
weekend as I only attend sixteen of the Grand Prix,
so I'm a good old fashioned fan this weekend, just
watching on the television and I just you know, that
is why I love Formula and that is what I
love when I was a kid growing up, you know,
seeing your favorite driver or seeing someone just do something
(02:43):
remarkable and really special. And there's no question that that
was you know, y Max is a generational talent. That
car is clearly quick, otherwise it couldn't be on pool.
But he's he's certainly had to work his magic behind
the wheel to deliver the lab.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Put us on the site, David with him if if
you can. What is it that he does so well?
Speaker 4 (03:08):
I think his senses are on such a high level
that he feels the car moving before mere mortals would realize.
And of course all Formula One drivers are good, they're
all extreme talents. But in any elite sport you're looking
for the exceptional talents, and whether it's football, whether it's
(03:29):
you know tennis, whether it's Formula one, there's always two
or three guys at any given time that do things
and you go, I don't know how they did that,
And the truth is they probably don't know how they
did it. It's just so innate in their their their
the psyche, their their ability to feel adhesion. He's he's
(03:50):
clearly got a very very sensitive seat of his pants
and fingertips on the steering wheel.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
What a great way of describing at Lando norisskops three
two and three. Does McLaren same significantly quickly? Not have
a step and you know in any cap probably drives
it fast, but doesn't the Clarence seems significantly quicker to you.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Yeah, I think the way McLaren are able to top
the times pretty much in every session shows that that
is the car. That is the sort of car for
the varying conditions that we're seeing over the first three
Grand Priise. Whether it remains the car, of course, it
depends on the development profile that McLaren are able to
(04:30):
say on. That's what brought them into contention last year
that they found correlation between their upgrades in Virtual World
that enabled them to build them put them on the
car and it delivered lap time in the real world
and that's you know, without getting overlaid Techi. That is
forever the challenge for these Formula One teams because you know,
you can't just sort of put the regulations into an
(04:53):
AI design tool, otherwise they'd all pop out the same
and they'd all be as quick as each other. You know,
there's different opinions as to how to exploit those regulations.
There's different ways of laying up the camp, the carbon
fiber which allows it to flex and bend and all
of that sort of good stuff that hardcore fans will
be following. But right now McLaren is the car rebel
(05:14):
clearly in the hands of Max can be as quick
as him, and today I think that's one of those
moments where remember where you were when you saw Max
get pole position in Suzuka.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Well, Liam Lawson, of course, Amen, I know you've been
following with interest as where you have. What's been happening
over the first two or three Grand Prix. He got
out of Q one qualified fourteenth on the groat. How
much confidence will he take from then?
Speaker 4 (05:36):
Yeah, it was an important weekend for him to rebuild
after what was very very difficult first to Grand Prix,
and he won't be happy, because you're only happy when
you're you know, a little bit ahead of your teammate,
that is your benchmark at the end of the day.
But he will be let's say, a little bit of
pressure has been released. He's back in an environment, he
(05:57):
knows the team well. They've done a great effort to
welcome him home, welcome him back into that team. And
of course he will be validated in his difficult in
the first two races by going, well, look, Yuki was
further up the grid in this car and he's now
behind me. So there'll be a lot of those sort
of box ticking exercises. But when you take away that emotion,
(06:17):
when you take away that you know what sort of
parenting desire to put your arm around the shoulders of
these guys. This is formula one. And when you take
away all the opinion and you take away all the emotion,
you're left with data. And that data is called a stopwatch,
and that stopwatch doesn't lie. So I think Liam can
(06:40):
feel good. I think there's a great building block for
him going forward, big opportunity again tomorrow to see if
he can bring the car home and the points. I
believe in Liam. I think he's a talent. I think he,
you know, just didn't quite get himself up to speed
quickly enough within the red Bulls scenario. But this is
his opportunity to rebuild.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
What about Yuki Sonada, David, He's qualified fifteenth car is
very difficult to drive. Liam had trouble in it Uki
fifteenth today. How do you predict he will go in
that car?
Speaker 4 (07:16):
Yeah, he will be disappointed, of course, because he was
within a few tenths of Max through the clean free practices,
which I think that's all that's really expected. If anyone
is matching Max consistently, you know you found the next
super talent, haven't you. You know? But whether you're a
maxi Astappen fan or not, this isn't about putting your
favorite cap on. This is just about dealing with the facts.
(07:38):
You know, Max is a generational talent, and for Uk
or any of Max's teammates, it's about being within a
few tens and if you can be within a few tens,
then you're you're doing a great job. The difficulty, of course,
that anyone in that car right now is having Formula
one is so incredibly close. If you're half a second
or more away, you're outside the top ten. You're therefore
(08:02):
in a difficult situation to make strategy work to find
points in the Grand Prix itself.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
I looked at your career, David the Third, in your
first full season with Williams Rainow in ninety five, I podiums,
including you mine in Grand Prix win in Portugal. How
did you come to terms with the car so quickly?
Speaker 4 (08:24):
But I was doing a filming for F one TV
recently called Memory Box, and they were taking me through
that sort of ninety four, the tragedy of Senna and
Ratzenberger sharing the carbonage of Mansel ninety five. As you mentioned,
my first cool season, I was a puppy and I
peed on the carpet a left, right, and center. I
(08:44):
made so many mistakes it's embarassing looking back. What saved
me was I had underlying pace in that I could
drive the car quickly and I felt comfortable within the
Williams team. Could have been the test driver for a
few years. But if I you know, if we had
the gift to be able to do it all again,
I would need to grow up. I would need to
(09:06):
get my brain into a to a space where you
are a full professional rather than just you know, wide
eyed and bushy tailed and just being reactive. So the
way I always feel i've been dealing with pressure is
pressure is when you feel you're losing control of a situation.
Pressure is not other people's expectations. And I say that
(09:28):
when I do my commentary, when people would ask, oh, god,
the driver's under so much pressure, and I go, well,
is he does he feel he's not in control? Does
he feel he's you know, his destiny is out of
his hands. If the answer is yes and yeah, I
suspect he does feel pressure. But if he feels yep,
this is my moment, let me go and show what
(09:49):
I can do. Then, irrespective of what the outside world thinks,
if that is the driver's mindset, I don't think they
feel pressure because we've been doing this since we were kids.
You know. None of these guys just arrived last week
and decided, Hey, I'm going to be a grand free driver.
They have been through a roller coaster of you know,
when losing, mistakes, arguments, you know, all of those things
(10:11):
since they were kids.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
So you did you then? Did it take any time
at all? For you to feel comfortable in the car.
Did you ever feel comfortable in a machine like that
or was that just not possible?
Speaker 4 (10:25):
I understand the question in terms of how maybe people
would perceive comfort. A Grand Prix car is not a
comfortable place. It starts with it's not comfortable to sit in,
it's not comfortable to drive, and when the car is
trying to spit you into the wall, it's not a
comfortable feeling. My experience is fast cars are difficult to drive,
(10:50):
and that penny dropped when I went from the ninety
five Williams, which was a Grand Prix winning car, to
the ninety five McLaren, which had been a really average
car during that season. I tested it at the end
of the ninety five season and prior to me joining
McLaren in ninety six, and I was really worried because
I thought, this car is like two seconds slower. This
is going to be frightening to drive. And I went
(11:12):
out and it was like a limousine. And the reason
it was like a limousine it didn't have the downforce,
it didn't have the group to take the tires to
the limit of their adhesion, and you know the same compound,
and the same construction of tires on the Williams was
going two seconds quicker, So you can imagine they had
a lot more load going through them, a lot more
(11:33):
energy going through them. They were a lot more taken
to the limit of what those tires could actually handle.
So fast cars are difficult and uncomfortable. Slow cars the
drivers always think, yeah, give me a quick car and
I'll show you what I can do. Well, give them
a quick car. Sometimes they go, oh, this is a
bit difficult to drive. Why is it not easier? So
(11:54):
if you just think about it going I've never climbed Everest,
but I imagine getting to the top of Everest must be
pretty uncomfortable. Well, my old teammate Mark Webers says, being
in Formula one at the highest level is like getting
to the top of Everest and then taking the oxygen
mask off. I love that.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
We had Mike on the show a couple of weeks
ago and it was it was as articulate as you are.
You saw the chicken flag thirteen times. What is that like?
Speaker 4 (12:23):
It's a wonderful feeling of achievement. And I again, having
gone down the old memory box filming last week, I
remember i'd see the checker flag, I keep my foot
absolutely nailed until I was well across the line. I
would then have to ask the team, can you confirm
I won the race? Because I always had this fear
that I was in some kind of dream. And you know,
(12:46):
I've seen drivers lose races by lifting off and celebrating
before the checker flag and things like that. You see
it in running races, and I never wanted to be
one of those guys. So yeah, it seems what I
did two D two hundred and forty or Grand Prix
and only one thirteen of them. The reality is a
Lewis Hamilton, who's the most winning driver in the history
(13:07):
of our sport, he's only one twenty odd percent of
the races he's entered. We do a lot of losing.
It is a horrible statistic. If you were a boxer
or if you were a fund manager, you know, imagine
if you were only winning twenty odd percent of the
time in those businesses. But that's just the nature of
our sport. It's a privilege, though, to be in Formula one,
(13:29):
to work at that level with the incredible men and
women that design and build these cars, and to then
steer it on their behalf to the checker flag. Is
a wonderful feeling of achievement.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Amazing. Can we just circle back to Liam to finish? David,
I mean, we love him, but we're biased. Of course,
he's one of ours. You're alluded to it before when
you said you do say promising things in his future.
Can you maybe just expand on that. How do you
write him as a driver? What do you predict the
Liam Lawson?
Speaker 4 (13:58):
Well, I hope very much that this little hiccup is
kind of what we saw with Alex Albon, where Alex
had a tricky year, relatively young at the time, not
a lot of experience and kind of struggle to pull
the whole season together. And again, like my ninety five season,
although I finished third, it was there was a much
(14:19):
bigger gap in the performance of the cars in those days,
so I was in a very privileged position. Formula One
today is so close that these guys have to be
at a higher level. They are at a higher level.
The next generation is always better. So you know, let's
start with the fact that Liam is a much better
race driver than I ever was, but he races in
a time which which is much much more competitive. He's
(14:42):
got to Formula one on merit, on talent. He's growing
up in the public eye because no matter how mature
and how you know, worldly he thinks he is, stick
him in five years in the same situation. He's just
going to be more mature. You know, you can't stick
an old head on young shoulders, much as we would
have loved that. And he has got to grow up
(15:05):
in the public whilst continuing to follow his dream of
becoming a Formula and world champion. I believe all of
those things that brought him to Formula one are still there.
He's got over the first hurdle, which every driver has
hurdles in their life, and he's now can take a
breath and go and show that he can bring points
(15:26):
home for racing bulls. His next goal has to be
to be team leader, so he's got to get in
front of Haja and if he does that, he's back
on track. If he's consistently a little bit behind Hadja
for whatever reason, whatever excuses anyone wants to pull out
the stopwatch tells us the running order, then he's got
to have tried absolutely everything to overcome that. And only
(15:49):
when he's tried absolutely everything. Can he just accept his
place in this world, which if he finishes up as
merely one of the very you know, talented race drivers
that are lucky enough to be in Formula one, that's
still a pretty good place to be in New Zealand.
Can be proud. But I still believe there's there's a
enough promise there for him to work this out and
(16:09):
make his way back to a winning situation.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
David, it's been such a pleasure and on education having
you join us across New Zealand. Thanks so much for
lending us your expertise. We like you will watch Liam's
progress with interest. Again, thank you for your time this afternoon.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
Thank you very much, Thank you, David.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
David Coultart MBA. What a what a superban site into
one of the toughest sports on the Plannet.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
For more from Weekend Sport with Jason Fine, listen live
to News Talks ed b weekends from midday or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio.
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