Lawson shares a quiet word with Marko as Red Bull’s 2026 call nears
The whispers started before the engines fired. Down in the Lusail paddock, Liam Lawson slipped into a small table with Helmut Marko, the Red Bull kingmaker who still has a habit of deciding careers with a raised eyebrow and a nod. A few minutes later, team boss Laurent Mekies joined them. Not a summit, exactly — but not nothing either.
The timing matters. Red Bull is set to confirm its 2026 driver line-ups for both the senior team and Racing Bulls on Tuesday, with the final round in Abu Dhabi still to come. That’s the line from Mekies, who said after the Qatar Grand Prix that the announcement will land as planned and won’t distract the team heading into the finale.
What that means for Lawson is the live question rattling around the hospitality units. The 23-year-old put in the sort of race on Sunday that tends to stick in the memory at moments like this — disciplined, patient, and opportunistic as he rose from 12th on the grid to ninth at the flag. It wasn’t flashy. It didn’t need to be.
When the microphones arrived, the Kiwi kept his poker face. Any hint on 2026? “No. Unfortunately not,” he said. Yuki Tsunoda — the other name in the frame for that remaining Racing Bulls seat alongside rising junior Arvid Lindblad — was equally tight-lipped: “We’ll see.”
The broader picture, as the paddock has been expecting for weeks, points toward a shuffle across the Red Bull stable. Isack Hadjar has impressed in 2025 and is widely tipped to step up to Red Bull Racing as Max Verstappen’s teammate, with Lindblad moving into a full-time F1 seat at the sister outfit. That would leave one chair to fill at Racing Bulls, and Lawson vs Tsunoda has become one of the year’s more nuanced internal debates: youth versus experience, raw edges versus known quantity.
Lawson’s campaign has been anything but linear. It began with the glare of the senior team, then veered back toward Faenza, where he’s stitched together a steady run of points and a best of fifth in Baku. The speed has been there in flashes; the racecraft has sharpened. In Qatar, he delivered exactly the sort of tidy execution teams tend to value when they’re looking at long-haul development alongside a rookie.
Tsunoda, meanwhile, has logged his own string of points in the top team this year, his best also coming in Baku. That consistency, paired with years in the Red Bull system, keeps his stock sturdy. You can see why this decision has inched along to December: both drivers can make a case, and Red Bull has never been afraid to go late with a call if it thinks the last couple of races will tell it something new.
Back to the paddock table in Lusail. A Lawson–Marko chat, later joined by Mekies, isn’t a smoking gun, but it’s a sign the conversation is active and close to the top. These are the meetings you want to be in when decisions are measured in tenths and tendencies as much as in points and headlines.
There’s also the Verstappen factor to consider, not in the sense of influence but in compatibility. Whoever lands in the seat next to him in 2026 will need to be robust enough to live with the standard he sets and pragmatic enough to deliver when the car is blunt or the weekend goes sideways. That’s part of the calculus for Red Bull — and part of why Lindblad–Lawson (or Lindblad–Tsunoda) at Racing Bulls becomes a developmental pairing with clear roles.
The only certainty is the timeline. “We will announce on Tuesday,” Mekies said after the race, putting an end — finally — to a decision that’s been pushed from Mexico to the season’s final stretch. If Sunday in Qatar was an audition, Lawson did what he could: kept it clean, banked points, and showed the kind of composure that plays well in December meetings.
Now, it’s Red Bull’s move.
