The Racing Bulls boss has some encouraging words for New Zealand driver Liam Lawson.<\/p>\n
Lawson is on a break after completing his first full season in Formula 1 which presented him with many challenges.<\/p>\n
Lawson was demoted from Red Bull to junior team Racing Bulls after just two rounds of the 2025 championship.<\/p>\n
Despite seven top 10 finishes during the season Lawson had to wait\u00a0until the last round to have his seat confirmed\u00a0for 2026.<\/p>\n
There was plenty of praise for the 23-year-old during the season, most notably after his sixth-place finish in Austria and fifth in Azerbaijan.<\/p>\n
His team-mate Isack Hadjar has been promoted to Red Bull for 2026, while Arvid Lindblad will join him at Racing Bulls.<\/p>\n
Lawson now has another year to prove himself and Racing Bulls Team Principal Alan Permane is encouraged.<\/p>\n
“I truly see genius in him,” Permane told PlanetF1.<\/p>\n
“I think it’s up to all of us, him included, to try and understand, when everything is going well – and it often is – like during exceptional races in Austria, Budapest, and during qualifying and the race in Baku, what the secret is to this success.<\/p>\n
“We have to try to reproduce that throughout the season.”<\/p>\n
Lawson said he was relieved to have secured a seat for next year and had learnt from his roller-coaster run.<\/p>\n
“I think doing a first full season – you go in with a goal of how you think the year will go,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Obviously this year went a different way than what I thought and I’ve definitely learned to roll with that.<\/p>\n
“Going into next year, I’ll be in a much better position because of it.”<\/p>\n
F1 testing starts in Spain at the end of January with another two sessions in Bahrain in February. The opening round is in Australia in March.<\/p>\n
2026 F1 calendar<\/p>\n
6-8 March: Australia<\/p>\n
13-15 March: China<\/p>\n
27-29 March: Japan<\/p>\n
10-12 April: Bahrain<\/p>\n
17-19 April: Saudi Arabia<\/p>\n
1-3 May: Miami<\/p>\n
22-24 May: Canada<\/p>\n
5-7 June: Monaco<\/p>\n
12-14 June: Spain (Barcelona)<\/p>\n
26-28 June: Austria<\/p>\n
3-5 July: Great Britain<\/p>\n
17-19 July: Belgium<\/p>\n
24-26 July: Hungary<\/p>\n
21-23 August: Netherlands<\/p>\n
4-6 September: Italy<\/p>\n
11-13 September: Spain (Madrid)<\/p>\n
24-26 September: Azerbaijan<\/p>\n
9-11 October: Singapore<\/p>\n
23-25 October: United States (Austin)<\/p>\n
30 October-1 November: Mexico<\/p>\n
6-8 November: Brazil<\/p>\n
19-21 November: Las Vegas<\/p>\n
27-29 November: Qatar<\/p>\n
4-6 December: Abu Dhabi<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Racing Bulls boss has some encouraging words for New Zealand driver Liam Lawson. Lawson is on a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210659,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-210658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}