Liam Lawson says the voice that steadied him during his roughest spell in 2025 belonged to the man he replaced.
In a quietly revealing admission at the end of the season, the New Zealander credited Daniel Ricciardo as a crucial sounding board in the bruising opening months of his first full campaign. It’s a twist only F1 can produce: Lawson steps into Ricciardo’s shoes, the veteran slips out of the sport without ceremony after Singapore 2024, and then becomes the guy on the other end of the line when the kid’s confidence wobbles.
“He’s been somebody that I obviously looked up to when I was very young,” Lawson said over the Abu Dhabi weekend. “After working alongside him in the last couple of years… I learned to have a huge amount of respect for him with how everything went down last year, especially, and how respectful he was towards me, and that never changed. Every time I picked up the phone to ask for advice, he was always there to talk.”
Ricciardo’s eight wins and 13 years in the sport ended with little fuss. No farewell lap, no standing ovation. He just slipped out of the paddock, and into a different role in Lawson’s story.
The connection goes back to Zandvoort 2023, when Ricciardo broke his hand in practice and Lawson was dropped into the AlphaTauri (now Racing Bulls) seat with no warning. That five-race cameo was crisp enough to shove Lawson back into Red Bull’s thinking after a period in which the junior pipeline looked clogged. Fast forward to 2025 and the Kiwi’s fast-tracked promotion to the senior team went the hard way: partnering Max Verstappen, learning an unforgiving RB22, and finding the walls closing in early.
By the Chinese Grand Prix, the pressure valve was hissing. Red Bull opted for a straight swap: Lawson down to Racing Bulls, Yuki Tsunoda back up. The move was framed as both a performance play for the second Red Bull and a measure to take the heat off a rookie with less than a season’s worth of grands prix behind him. Verstappen didn’t hide his disagreement with how it went down, but the shuffle ultimately served Lawson well.
If there was a pivot point, Lawson and Racing Bulls boss Alan Permane both pointed to Monaco. Somewhere in the team’s tangle of setup and confidence, a thread was found. From there, the laps got tidier, the Saturdays sharper, the Sundays more stubborn. The young Kiwi wasn’t just surviving; he started to look like the driver who kicked the door open in 2023.
“And then going into this year, especially earlier in the year with how tough it was, he’s somebody I spoke to quite a bit,” Lawson added of Ricciardo. “He’s somebody that I have a very, very good amount of respect for.”
It’s easy to forget how thin the margins are for a driver at Lawson’s experience level, especially when the seat you’re warming belongs to the sport’s most demanding race team. The RB22 didn’t hand him a soft landing, and the scrutiny was instant. In that context, Ricciardo’s counsel — practical, empathetic, and, crucially, unthreatened — makes sense. The Australian has lived the swings: a star turn at Red Bull, the costly McLaren detour, the comeback bid with AlphaTauri/Racing Bulls, the quiet goodbye. If anyone can translate chaos into manageable chunks, it’s him.
By season’s end, Lawson had rebuilt his footing. Up against Isack Hadjar at Racing Bulls, he was broadly matching the French rookie’s pace and execution, the kind of in-house benchmark that means more to team bosses than the public leaderboards. The upshot was another year on the books and, notably, the nod over Tsunoda. For a driver who started 2025 in the glare of Red Bull’s second car and looked like he might be chewed up by it, that’s a tidy piece of damage limitation — and a platform.
There’s a broader, slightly poetic angle to all this. Ricciardo didn’t get the fanfare his career probably deserved. But he’s left fingerprints on Red Bull’s next era in a different way: stabilising Lawson when the cameras weren’t rolling, offering the kind of good sense a young driver only really hears from someone who’s been burned and bounced back. It’s an unglamorous legacy, but a meaningful one.
Lawson, for his part, still needs to turn the corner from resilience to relentlessness. The mid-season uptick can’t be a cameo. Racing Bulls saw flashes that encouraged them — Permane even hinted there’s a touch of “genius” in there when the car window opens — and that’s the mandate for 2026: less firefighting, more force of habit.
The irony? In a season that began with a high-profile promotion and an even more public demotion, Lawson may have found exactly what he needed — his voice — because he kept picking up the phone to listen to someone else’s.
