(Motorsport-Total.com) – Liam Lawson has strongly rejected the portrayal surrounding his surprising demotion at Red Bull in 2025. The New Zealander emphasizes that the public narrative, according to which the team took him out of the cockpit out of concern for his mental state, “could not be further from the truth.”
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Lawson’s stint for Red Bull lasted only two race weekends at the start of the 2025 Formula 1 season. Afterwards, he was sent back to Racing Bulls. In the “High Performance Podcast”, the New Zealander now speaks extensively about this time and explains how he himself dealt with the situation.
“I tried to let it affect me as little as possible. I even pretended it never happened,” says Lawson. “I was there for two races and the way everything went was so crazy that, honestly, I just told myself: I’ll pretend I was never there.”
Lawson sees lack of preparation as the main problem
Lawson admits that he made mistakes himself but sees the causes of his difficulties mainly in insufficient preparation.
“First of all, you can always do a better job,” he says. “Looking back at those two races, I could have done some things better. But we practically had no tests. I only had half a test day before the season and even the test in Bahrain was very limited due to some problems. That’s why I went into the first race weekend very unprepared.”
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Additional difficulties arose. In Melbourne, Lawson missed the third free practice due to an engine problem. “Because of that, I went into qualifying without a single lap on the soft tires and then made mistakes,” he explains. “I tried to compensate for that, braked too late, and went off track. These are actually mistakes I normally don’t make.”
Radical overhaul in China
The second race weekend in China also started under difficult conditions from Lawson’s perspective. Since it was a sprint weekend and he had never driven the circuit before, there was again hardly any time to get used to the car.
After qualifying, Red Bull decided, according to Lawson, together with him on an extraordinary step. The team rebuilt the car for the race with a radically changed setup. “We made a huge change that you would never make on a normal race weekend,” Lawson reports. “The idea was to test a different direction to make the car easier to drive for me and for the team.”
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However, the plan was associated with significant risks. “I was told: This will help you in the future and provide the team with important insights. You are starting from the pit lane anyway, so let’s try something.”
“This performance was used against me”
According to Lawson, the experiment turned out to be a failure. “It didn’t work at all for this race. The car was incredibly hard to drive, destroyed the tires, and ruined our race.” Lawson is particularly critical that this very performance was later included in the evaluation of his future.
“This performance in China was later used against me. Regardless of these two races on two tracks where I had never driven before, I will not accept that. You can’t judge me based on that. Formula 1 is a team sport and everyone works together.”
Lawson contradicts speculation
After the race weekend in China, Lawson lost his place at Red Bull and returned to Racing Bulls for the Japanese Grand Prix.
At the paddock at the time, it was speculated, among other things, that Red Bull had taken the New Zealander out of the cockpit to protect him from the enormous pressure in the top team. Lawson now firmly rejects exactly this portrayal: “The whole story was presented as if I had mental struggles and Red Bull wanted to protect me,” he says. “That was not at all the reality.”
With his statements, Lawson instead paints the picture of a decision that, in his view, was made on a very small data basis and in which the difficult circumstances of his first two race weekends were not sufficiently taken into account.
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