Lawson flips Monza heartache into Baku high with career-best P3 as Racing Bulls nail the chaos
Two weeks after calling his Monza qualifying mistake “soul‑destroying,” Liam Lawson turned up in Baku with receipts. The Racing Bulls driver rode out a two‑hour, stop‑start qualifying marathon to bag a career-best third on the grid, the sort of recovery drive that tells you more about a rookie’s ceiling than any highlight reel.
This wasn’t a classic “hook up one lap and go home” Saturday. It was cool, windy, occasionally wet and endlessly interrupted — a record stack of red flags slicing the session into fragments. Drivers were either tripping over the conditions or tripping over each other. Baku at its most Baku.
Lawson and Racing Bulls changed the script by changing the plan. After Monza’s miscalculation — a deleted lap at the first Lesmo and no fuel to try again, which left him 20th — they went conservative in Azerbaijan. Fuel for flexibility, stay out when it’s green, don’t get caught in pitlane while the clock dies. Simple on paper. Brave when the field’s on a knife-edge.
“It was one of the toughest qualifyings I’ve done,” Lawson admitted later. “With the wind, the rain threatening, and all the stops, it was more about getting a lap on the board and being in the right place at the right time.” That last bit mattered most. In Q3, Lawson was one of the few who threaded a flying lap between two red flags. He sat second for a good while and, when the mess settled, was third — the best starting spot of his F1 career.
The contrast with Monza was stark, and intentional. There, Racing Bulls backed their pace and rolled the dice on a tight fuel load. Here, they logged laps. Lots of them. “Today we just kept running,” he said with a laugh. “We played it safer and maximised track time. For this kind of session, that worked.”
It’s the kind of adjustment that tends to stick. When a team learns the hard way, it usually only needs the lesson once. You could see it in the way Lawson approached the final runs — not cautious, but measured. Push to the walls without blinking, yet leave yourself room to go again if Baku throws another curveball. That balance is where rookies usually come unstuck; Lawson looked like he’d been doing this here for years.
He also didn’t sugar‑coat how disorienting the place can be when the wind switches: a car that feels planted into Turn 1 can be skittish by Turn 15, and the lap is long enough that the conditions can change on you mid‑run. “You start a new lap and it can feel completely different,” he said. “Over such a long lap, it’s really challenging.”
As for Sunday, there’s no grand pronouncement. Baku encourages optimism and punishes certainty in equal measure. “We’d love to stay where we are,” Lawson said, “but we know there are quicker guys behind. Get a good launch, see what the wind’s doing, and go from there.” The team’s long‑run pace looked decent enough in practice to make life interesting, but this race has a habit of inventing its own plot twists.
The headline, though, is the mindset shift. Racing Bulls boxed smartly, Lawson kept his head, and together they turned an error-strewn Monza into a tidy Baku. The raw speed’s been there all season; on Saturday they paired it with timing and composure. In a session that rewarded opportunists and punished gamblers, Lawson and the team picked the right side.
Baku will almost certainly try something on him tomorrow — it always does. But with a front‑row‑adjacent grid slot and a car that behaved when the chaos peaked, Lawson’s got the right starting hand. If qualifying proved anything, it’s that in Azerbaijan, the surest way to win the lottery is to make sure you’ve actually bought a ticket every time the lights go green.
