Liam Lawson says he is treating his stint filling in for the injured Daniel Ricciardo at AlphaTauri as his “one shot” in Formula 1.
The New Zealander made his first outing in the AT04 in FP3 at the Dutch Grand Prix after Ricciardo suffered a metacarpal break in an FP2 crash.
Lawson recovered from 19th on the grid to a 13th place finish on Sunday, having been faced with challenging conditions over the course of the 72-lap race.
“It obviously feels better having done more preparation for the weekend,” Lawson said ahead of the Italian Grand Prix.
“You just don’t have a huge amount of time to learn everything you want, especially in our situation last week. In a preferred world, you’d have a week or two to really get everything sorted in your mind, but it was in like 12 hours for us,” he reflected on his maiden F1 outing.
On his, and Red Bull’s, targets for himself this weekend, the 21-year-old said: “Not a clear target like a position or something like that from the weekend just to continue improving, I guess.
“But I’m sure before the weekend or after practice at least we’ll have more of an idea of where we sit sort of with everybody and then maybe I have more of a clear target.
“I think any time you can get a shot, you really only get one shot at Formula 1, and so for me that’s come right now. So, I understand for sure the importance of it, but it’s [a full-time F1 seat] not something that I’m looking at trying to set up for next year.
“Right now, the focus is on this weekend. I don’t know how important it is, but that’s really as far as it goes.”
When questioned on how important it is to not “overdo” it at Monza while being unsure of how much time he has to make a statement to his employers, Lawson responded by saying: “You can look at it super deeply like that and sort of overthink things, [How I’m looking at it is] I know I have three practice sessions to learn as much as I can.
“And by the end of practice, I’ll have an understanding of whereabouts we are in terms of pace and where we think we can be. And then, I guess, mindset and focus will take us on to qualifying. But right now, qualifying and the race is not really too much about what I’m thinking about.
“It’s the same approach [as last weekend]. Just obviously complete the race and do all the laps.”
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