Liam Lawson felt set up to fail in his two-race stint at Red Bull Racing that ended with his demotion to Racing Bulls last year.
What happened?
Lawson replaced Sergio Pérez at Red Bull Racing at the start of last season off the back of a two-part 11-race cameo at Racing Bulls in 2023 and 2024 but was alarmingly adrift of teammate Max Verstappen.
He qualified on average 0.9 seconds 15.5 places behind the Dutchman.
Red Bull Racing was struggling for form generally, and Lawson was used in part to troubleshoot the car’s problems.
The experimental set-up
The Kiwi was given an experimental set-up for his second race, the Chinese Grand Prix, in a bid to tame a car that had proven extremely difficult to drive.
“We had spoken about trying something quite wild on the car to get some comfort for me but also because the team at the time collectively we weren’t happy at all with the car, Max wasn’t happy,” he told the High Performance podcast.
The outcome
Lawson said he felt let down by the team to have been dealt with so brutally after just two compromised grands prix.
“Two races at two tracks I’ve never been to in a season like that — I won’t accept that you can judge me off that,” he said.
At the time of the switch, Christian Horner, the then Red Bull Racing principal, claimed Lawson’s demotion was part of his “duty of care to protect” the Kiwi and that he’d been mentally struggling in the top team.
What's next for Liam Lawson?
Lawson hit back at Horner’s claims, saying “honestly, that could not be further from what it was actually like.”
He wasn’t the only rookie turfed after a small sample size of races, with fellow antipodean Jack Doohan axed from Alpine just six grands prix in the season and eventually frozen out of his team completely.
Lawson’s experience serves as a reminder of the cutthroat nature of Formula 1.