Liam Lawson says he rolled the dice in Shanghai — and that gamble ended up costing him his Red Bull seat.
The New Zealander revealed he and the team pursued a “shot in the dark” set-up on the RB21 at the Chinese Grand Prix, a direction he believed was aimed at fast-tracking his understanding of the car. Instead, the weekend’s struggles were cited in his demotion.
“In China, we took a shot in the dark with the set-up to try and learn something,” Lawson told RacingNews365. “For me, I was under the understanding that it was to help me develop for the future… That performance was then used to demote me from the team, basically.”
It capped a brutal two-race audition. Having been announced last year as Max Verstappen’s 2025 team-mate — Christian Horner called Lawson’s trajectory the more compelling bet over Yuki Tsunoda — he didn’t clear Q1 in either Australia or China and failed to score. Red Bull then performed the sharpest of U-turns, swapping him back to Racing Bulls and moving Tsunoda up in time for the Japanese Grand Prix.
The Shanghai experiment came on a sprint weekend with less practice time, hardly the ideal canvas for a rookie finding his feet in a notoriously peaky car. Lawson qualified 20th for both sessions, climbed six places in the sprint, and finished two shy of the points on Sunday. It wasn’t enough.
“There were a few things over that time that made it not smooth,” he admitted. “By my own standards, they weren’t good enough… If I knew I was going to get two races, I would have probably done things slightly differently. I was maybe a bit naive, but I thought I was going to get longer and have time to learn.”
It’s a stark illustration of the Red Bull world: development experiments are encouraged — until they aren’t. Without the cushion of extra mileage or extended testing, a left-field set-up can turn into a career pivot.
Back at Racing Bulls, Lawson’s found his rhythm again. After a slow reset, he’s scored in four of the last seven race weekends to reach 20 points for the season — 10 more than Tsunoda and ahead of team-mate Isack Hadjar. The numbers won’t erase the sting of that early-season call, but they do underline why Red Bull rolled the dice on him in the first place.
Whether the door upstairs reopens is another matter. For now, Lawson’s doing the one thing that still moves opinions in Milton Keynes: delivering on Sundays.
