Pierre Gasly will sit out Friday's opening practice session at Spa as AlphaTauri hands Red Bull junior Liam Lawson his official F1 debut.
Lawson, a two-time winner with Carlin in the FIA Formula 2 Championship this season, will have a busy Friday as the Kiwi manages his FP1 outing with his F2 commitment.
Slowly but surely, F1 teams are adding young drivers to their Friday schedule, in accordance with this year's sporting rules that mandate that each team allocate at least two practice sessions to a young driver.
Red Bull Racing ran Juri Vips in FP1 in Barcelona while Williams - which gave track time to Mercedes EQ works driver Nyck de Vries in Spain - will run junior charger Logan Sargeant in FP1 at the US Grand Prix in October.
AlphaTauri has yet to define its driver line-up for 2023. While Pierre Gasly is committed to the Italian outfit until the end of 2023, the future of his current teammate Yuki Tsunoda is still up in the air.
But AlphaTauri team boss Franz Tost; recently said if the Japanese driver completes a satisfactory second half of the season, he'll likely remain on the grid next year with the team.
welcome back to the cockpit @LiamLawson30! ✌️
the young Kiwi will make his official F1 session debut this weekend at Spa 👌 taking over the wheel of Pierre's AT03 pic.twitter.com/6ZxwbDcPv5
— Scuderia AlphaTauri (@AlphaTauriF1) August 23, 2022
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