(Motorsport-Total.com) – In the podcast “High Performance,” Liam Lawson speaks openly about toxic behavior in the Formula 1 community. The Racing Bulls driver has often witnessed the dark side of social media, especially after one or another confrontation on the track with Sergio Perez.
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“By now, this has happened so many times,” says the 24-year-old. “Especially with everything that has happened in the last twelve months. At some point, you just start to ignore it, because so many opinions, rumors, and such things fly around the world that simply aren’t true. And if you focus on every single point of it, you would go crazy.”
“It also depends on how much you engage with things like social media at all,” explains Lawson. “I have mostly removed it from my life.”
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According to Lawson himself, he has now muted his Formula 1 accounts and therefore hardly gets anything from this online cosmos anymore. When asked if this step helped him, the tenth-place finisher in the world championship answers: “Definitely for me. It made a big difference.”
“There are small things that have happened to me during my short career in Formula 1,” says Lawson. “At the time, these things were quite big, but in retrospect, I was very grateful for them.”
As an example of the wave that can hit you via social media, Lawson cites his duel with Perez in Mexico 2024. At that time, the question was which of the two would be sitting in Red Bull in 2025.
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Not surprisingly, the duel between the two was extremely intense. At that time, Lawson had not yet muted his posts on Instagram and was somewhat shocked after the race.
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“I’ve never seen anything like it,” describes the former DTM driver the situation. “The messages, the comments under posts; people said the craziest things you can imagine. Really the most terrible things.”
In the podcast, Lawson confirms that he was attacked both in comments and via direct messages. The Racing Bulls driver’s response? Delete social media apps from his phone until the end of the 2024 season.
The effects of social media in professional sports are felt not only by midfield drivers. Just last year, world champion Lando Norris openly spoke about his attempt to leave comments and opinions on platforms like Instagram behind.
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