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.
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, qualifying on average 0.9 seconds 15.5 places behind the Dutchman.
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Red Bull Racing, however, was struggling for form generally, and Lawson — whose pre-season was severely hampered by unreliability — was used in part to troubleshoot the car’s problems.
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.
“We decided [to] start from the pit lane and basically radically change the car — a change you would never do on a race weekend, like a normal change times 10.
“I was on board with it because the idea was, ‘Let’s try something quite crazy, but it might help get a direction for Liam and for the team going forward to make this car a bit easier to drive’.
“It’s a shot in the dark, and even if it kind of worked, the chance of it working over a race was really low.
“I knew all of these things, but it was proposed to me as, ‘This is going to help you for the future, and this is going to give us a bit more of a direction. We’re going to try this’.
“I ran it. It sucked … [but] honestly, I didn’t care at the time because I was like, ‘There’s a reason we’ve done this’.
“Then on [the next] Monday I get the phone call: ‘Actually we’re switching you’.
“If you’d told me before the race, ‘Okay, we’re going to run this crazy car for your last race in a Red Bull, or we’re going to run the set-up that you’ve run all weekend’, what do you think I would have said?
“That at the time was a really hard thing to deal with.”
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.
“It’s such a team game. You have to have everybody working together, and that was obviously not what I felt when that happened.”
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.
“Honestly, that could not be further from what it was actually like,” Lawson hit back.
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.
“The thing I thought about a lot is that there’s a lot of guys that got badly treated or unfairly treated in Formula 1 and were out,” Lawson said.
“Jack Doohan, somebody who did [six] races — that is not fair to judge somebody.
“I had two in a Red Bull, but even [six] races as a whole is not fair to judge somebody in Formula 1.
“But I still had a drive, so that was what I tried to really focus on, and that’s what we talked about a lot.
“You still have an opportunity to prove yourself here, you still have an opportunity to build a future in Formula 1 — that’s all still there — without focusing on the fact that I lost the dream drive that I wanted since I was young.”
Despite the harsh treatment, Lawson said the experience had helped him grow as a driver.
“Whenever I think about it, I feel like I’m a far better driver and a far more resilient driver,” he said.
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FERRARI POISED FOR GAME-CHANGING UPGRADE
Ferrari will bring its first engine upgrade to this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix under the sport’s contentious concession rules, according to Italian media reports.
Ferrari has been granted two upgrades for 2026 and another two for 2027, along with cost cap breaks and loosened development restrictions, under the ADUO regulations.
Standing for additional development and upgrade opportunities, the ADUO mechanism ranks engine manufacturers based on the performance of their internal combustion motors. The FIA undertakes analysis of performance roughly every quarter of the season using parameters kept secret from the teams to avoid them gaming the system.
However, the results of the first ADUO period, which ran to the end of the Canadian Grand Prix, controversially had Red Bull Powertrains ranked as the most powerful motor.
More surprising still was that Mercedes, by consensus fielding the best power unit package, was found to be down on power by two per cent or more, entitling the brand to one upgrade and some spending development concessions in 2026 and 2027.
Ferrari, along with Audi and Honda, was found to be more than four per cent down on power and thus entitled to two development opportunities in both 2026 and 2027 along with further spending and development concessions.
The Italian team has staked its season on receiving these concessions, having said as early as the Chinese Grand Prix, the second weekend of the year, that it expected to receive at least one upgrade opportunity.
Having pushed ahead expectantly with its engine program, the Italian media is reporting that Ferrari will have its first of two engine upgrades for the year ready to go in Austria.
Along with a new fuel from supplier Shell, Ferrari hopes it can slash the engine gap to Mercedes.
Fuel is an underrated performance component in 2026, with the fuel flow limit now based on megajoules per hour rather than kilograms per hour, as it had been since 2014.
A more energy-dense fuel can therefore bring both a boost in power output while also saving weight by allowing a car to complete a race distance with less in the tank.
The timing of the upgrade could be crucial for the team’s championship hopes, with three of the next four circuits sensitive to engine performance and energy recovery, in particular the upcoming races at Silverstone and Spa-Francorchamps.
Barcelona was the first weekend of the season Ferrari outscored Mercedes, reducing its deficit to 72 points. Lewis Hamilton’s victory slashed his gap to Andrea Kimi Antonelli to 40 points on the drivers title table.
Based on the results of the Spanish Grand Prix, equalising power output could draw Ferrari ahead of Mercedes in overall performance terms.
The team brought a significant aerodynamic upgrade to Spain, the result of which was to make the SF-26 the quickest car through the corners, with straight-line speed its only deficit, in particular how much earlier it would run out of charge at the end of the straights.
“If they have a better engine, they’re dominating,” reigning champion Lando Norris told Sky Sports after Barcelona. “They’re the class of the field in terms of cornering performance.
“If they make improvements on the engine side, then they’ll embarrass everyone.”
Waters slammed over ‘DANGEROUS’ move | 02:14
BOTTAS SAYS CAR ISSUES BEHIND SLOW START TO F1 COMEBACK
Cadillac driver Valtteri Bottas has admitted the start of his comeback season hasn’t gone as well as he’d hoped but that car inconsistency has played a significant role in his results.
The Finn had sat out the 2025 season after being dropped by his then Sauber team at the end of the previous year but rejoined the grid alongside fellow returnee Sergio Pérez to help build the brand-new Cadillac entry from the ground up.
However, despite a career of searing single-lap pace, he currently trails Pérez 5-2 in grand prix qualifying so far this season. Though the margin between them is a slender 0.078 seconds, that average is swayed by Pérez suffering deployment problems in China that left him almost 1.5 seconds adrift of his teammate.
Pérez has also achieved the team’s best qualifying result of 18th — twice, in Australia and Monaco — and has finished ahead of Bottas twice from the three grands prix both have finished, and the Mexican would have scored the team’s first point in Monaco had it not been for a start infringement.
While Bottas admitted the season “definitely hasn’t come my way yet”, he pointed to car problems being behind the one-sided scoreline.
“A lot of it is the inconsistency with the set-up,” he said, per RacingNews365. “Even some parts of the car quite often feel different to what you expect.
“Also, at the beginning of the year, having such a big gap between the races and not spending that much time on track hasn’t helped.
“But I’m really hoping that now we get into a better flow, a better rhythm, understand the issues we’ve been having with the car better and go from there. It’s still a long way to go.”
Both Cadillac drivers are contracted for next season, and Bottas and team boss Graeme Lowdon have shot down rumours linking development driver Colton Herta — still without a superlicence — to the Finn’s seat.