Ted Kravitz expects Liam Lawson to be rewarded for the season that saved his Formula 1 career. The Sky Sports F1 analyst said Racing Bulls will keep Lawson alongside Arvid Lindblad for 2027, with Red Bull junior Nikola Tsolov parked in a reserve role for the year.

Kravitz framed the call as a reward for the midfield team’s best campaign in years, with Racing Bulls on course to finish fifth in the constructors’ championship.

“They work well together, they score lots of points, it looks like Racing Bulls are going to finish fifth in the Constructors’ Championship and if only to reward them for scoring those points, they will be given another contract,” Kravitz said.

Racing Bulls sit fifth in the constructors’ standings on 100 points, 32 clear of sixth-placed Alpine and well ahead of Haas, Audi and Cadillac at the back of the grid.

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Lawson has outscored his teammate

The New Zealander has shouldered the bulk of that haul. Lawson has scored more than 55% of Racing Bulls’ points this season, and at Marina Bay he underlined why. He qualified eighth for the sprint, finished fifth in it, and took seventh in the Grand Prix on Sunday. Lindblad left Singapore pointless, nursing power-unit issues all weekend.

Those results pushed Lawson to 75 points and ninth in the drivers’ championship, 34 clear of Pierre Gasly as the leading midfield driver on the grid.

The 24-year-old also added 14 points during a three-race stand-in stint at Red Bull earlier in the year, scoring in two of them after being called up to cover for the injured Isack Hadjar from the Dutch Grand Prix. Red Bull confirmed a week after the Madrid race that Hadjar would stay in the senior seat for 2027, leaving Lawson’s future tied to Racing Bulls.

Tsolov to wait another year

That is where Kravitz expects the final piece to fall into place. Nikola Tsolov, currently second in the Formula 2 championship in his rookie season, had been pushed as a potential replacement for Lawson by sections of the Red Bull camp.

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Kravitz, however, believes the Bulgarian will spend 2027 learning the team from the inside rather than racing.

“Nikola Tsolov will have a year learning what it is to be a reserve driver, learning everything about the engineers, being in debriefs for what is sure to be a stellar F1 career, but that will be in the future,” he said.

Permane: decision ‘in the coming weeks’

The one caveat is that none of it is official yet. Racing Bulls team principal Alan Permane said at the Singapore Grand Prix that the lineup had not been finalized and that three drivers were still in the frame for two seats.

“I don’t want to give you a definite date. You know, no, that’s not going to work. It’s going to be in the coming weeks, let’s say,” Permane told reporters.

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“We’ve got two fantastic drivers. We’ve got a fantastic driver in F2 at the moment, and they’re all there and ready to go. But three doesn’t fit into two, of course.”

The next round is the United States Grand Prix in Austin on 23-25 October, followed by Mexico City, São Paulo, Las Vegas and Qatar before the season closes in Abu Dhabi on 4-6 December.

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