Liam Lawson says a setup change in China contributed to his demotion from Red Bull. Image: XPB Images
After a brief spell at Racing Bulls, the New Zealander was promoted to the senior Red Bull squad alongside Max Verstappen for the 2025 Formula 1 season, replacing Sergio Perez after just 11 career starts in the world championship.
But Lawson’s time in the main team was short-lived. He made his debut as a full-time Red Bull driver in Australia, qualifying 18th before crashing out of the race.
Two weeks later in China, he qualified last and finished outside the points, and was immediately replaced by Yuki Tsunoda in a straight swap with the Racing Bulls team.
Speaking to RacingNews365, Lawson said he arrived in 2025 with far less preparation than other young drivers.
“If you look at how other teams have approached bringing a young driver in and you look at the test days, the time in the seat, the amount of testing that, for example, Kimi [Antonelli], has done in the past before racing this year – we didn’t do any of that,” he said.
“It was two weekends on two tracks I’d never raced at, one of them being a sprint weekend. They weren’t smooth weekends.
“We had issues in Bahrain [testing] with reliability, we had issues in Melbourne with reliability.”
In China, Red Bull opted to pursue an aggressive set-up change in search of answers for the car’s tricky handling characteristics, a choice Lawson said was meant to help him in the long term.
“In China, we took a shot in the dark with the set-up to try and learn something,” he said.
“For me, I was under the understanding that it was to help me develop for the future, to have an understanding of the car.
“So I was happy to drive with this sort of set-up. That performance was then used to demote me from the team, basically.”
While Lawson says the machinery played a part, he accepts his own performances fell short.
“There were a few things over that time that made it not smooth,” he said.
“It wasn’t a clean couple of weekends. And by my own standards, they weren’t good enough. I was obviously trying as hard as I could, and I was trying to get up to speed as quickly as I could.
“As much as I look back now and go, ‘What could I have done to do that better?’, there are obviously things you look back in hindsight and go, ‘I wish that I’d done this differently to try and help me’.
“If I knew I was going to get two races, I would have probably done things slightly differently. But I didn’t at the time.
“I was maybe a bit naive, but I thought I was going to get longer and have time to learn.”
Since returning to Racing Bulls, Lawson has worked his way back into form.
After a slow start, he has scored points in three of the last four grands prix and four of the last seven overall, taking his season total to 20 — 10 more than Tsunoda has managed in the senior Red Bull — while also outscoring his Racing Bulls team-mate Isack Hadjar.