Lawson rejoined the Faenza-based operation ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix.

That weekend marked his first laps in the car, having started the season with Red Bull.

Even still, he made his first Q2 appearance of the year before a strategy gamble saw him finish the race 17th.

The team then missed the set-up window in Bahrain as the weather wreaked havoc during practice. Extreme heat during the first and third sessions complicated their decision-making.

Lawson reasoned that a lack of familiarity also played a role that weekend, not to mention a DRS issue in qualifying that was ultimately traced back to operator error.

“You do your prep work before you roll the car out, and it works exactly like you expect it to, and how you expect the track to be, and everything like that,” Lawson said.

“And then you’re fine-tuning.

“Sometimes, you roll the car out and, all of a sudden, conditions are different to what you expect.

“Everybody rolled out in qualifying and I think struggled massively from what we were expecting,” he added of Bahrain.

“With the conditions we expected it probably to be a bit easier to drive, being cooler from P3, but in reality it was actually a really difficult session for a lot of people.”

That saw Lawson bundled out of the session at the first hurdle with the 17th fastest time.

“We just didn’t quite get it right,” he said of his Bahrain set-up.

“The car is obviously still fast and I think in the race as well it was fast at points, depending what compound we were on.

“We had a competitive last stint, so it wasn’t, I think, a true show of form.”

That is at least in part a result of an unfamiliarity with the car.

Racing Bulls boss lifts lid on Lawson return

During testing, Lawson drove for Red Bull with the sum of his time in the VCARB02 coming over the Japanese and Bahrain race weekends.

That has afforded little time to dial in his personal preferences into the set-up, though that process is now beginning to happen.

“In terms of extracting the performance out of the car, I think I was definitely closer to that in Bahrain than in Japan,” Lawson said.

“But also, we had a weekend as well to get comfortable with things.

“As much as a car is what it is, everybody has their things that they like.

“To work all that out in one weekend is not the easiest to do.

“Every race weekend you do, between me and my engineers, we work out things that suit me, personally, to take forward.

“Now we get to go into a third weekend and start with more of those things.”

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