Liam Lawson has explained a major problem he endured with his demotion back to Racing Bulls – his comfort in the car.<\/p>\n
Lawson was promoted to the senior Red Bull team to replace Sergio Perez, but lasted just the Australian and Chinese Grands Prix before Yuki Tsunoda was swapped for him – despite the fact that Lawson had never driven at either Albert Park or Shanghai in F1.<\/p>\n
Since then, the New Zealander has enjoyed a strong run of form after the Austrian GP, securing a career-best fifth in Azerbaijan, after taking another career-high with third on the Baku grid.<\/p>\n
Lawson is just nine points behind team-mate Isack Hadjar, who has been tipped for promotion to replace the struggling Tsunoda as Max Verstappen’s 2026 team-mate, as he detailed the time it took to adjust to the VCARB-02 machine from the RB21 he started the season driving.<\/p>\n
“The timing was not the best, the car needed a quite different approach to driving, and I had to readapt,” Lawson told Automoto.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Since then, we have also made some changes to make me more comfortable, over the course of a few races. Obviously, the ideal situation would be to do all this before the start of the season, but I think it’s a process that helped me feel more comfortable in the last races.<\/p>\n
“The main problem concerns all those small aspects that make you comfortable with the car, and that you take care of before the season starts.<\/p>\n
“These are elements that concern the preferences of the driver in particular, beyond getting used to the car and making the most of it. All this, unfortunately, I had to do during the race weekends.<\/p>\n
“Laurent [Mekies] was a great help to me from the first call I had with him to prepare for Japan. He was great with me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“He understands drivers very well and establishes a personal relationship with them. He cares a lot and worries about everything we go through during a season, even on a personal level.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“He notices everything and takes time to understand and try to help us”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Liam Lawson has explained a major problem he endured with his demotion back to Racing Bulls – his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[3007,1687,3010,3008,3011,3009,831,372,6537,832,3006,3005,3004,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-171582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-f1","tag-daniel-ricciardo","tag-f1","tag-f1-calendar","tag-f1-live","tag-f1-results","tag-f1-standings","tag-ferrari","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-lewis-hamilton","tag-max-verstappen","tag-motorsport","tag-racing","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}