Liam Lawson walked away from Racing Bulls’ three-day Barcelona shakedown sounding like a driver who’s pleased — but not remotely fooled.
Yes, the VCARB 03 has taken a step. Yes, the team got through the sort of mileage that makes engineers sleep a little easier at night. But in the first week of the 2026 rules era, Lawson’s message was essentially: enjoy the progress, don’t try and rank it.
“We just keep learning. We’re making, obviously, big gains, but so is everybody else,” Lawson said after completing the team’s final permitted day of running.
That’s the reality of these early closed-doors outings. Cars are new, programmes are guarded, and lap times are borderline meaningless. What does matter is whether a team can turn up with a fundamentally coherent package, identify what’s wrong quickly, and build confidence in the basics — drivability, systems, reliability — before the more public, more revealing work begins.
On that front, Racing Bulls will take encouragement. Lawson logged 88 laps on Day 1, then returned on the third and final day to add a further 64 unofficial laps in the morning. In between, rookie team-mate Arvid Lindblad banked 120 laps on Day 3, giving the team a healthy amount of track time in a period where every clean lap is worth more than a dozen theory sessions back at base.
Lawson described a car that had moved on significantly even within the shakedown itself. “Very, very different cars,” he said of the 2026 generation, “but in a much better place than we were on Monday, which is the main thing.”
That line — “much better… than we were on Monday” — is the sort of comment you hear when a team has found its footing quickly: a set-up direction that makes sense, a response that’s consistent, and enough correlation between what the drivers feel and what the tools are telling the engineers. It doesn’t mean the car is fast. It does suggest it isn’t lost.
Mileage, too, was framed as a quiet win. “We’ve obviously had a pretty strong test in terms of reliability. So that’s been a box ticked in terms of expectations,” Lawson said. In the first week of a new formula, reliability isn’t glamorous, but it’s the foundation for everything else — especially for a midfield team that can’t afford to burn days chasing faults when development time is already at a premium.
If Lawson sounded upbeat, he also sounded realistic about what none of this answers yet. “It’s very hard. Obviously, we don’t know where anybody else is,” he admitted. “That’ll still be quite unknown for a while.”
That’s not false modesty. The 2026 reset will scramble competitive order at least early on, and Barcelona shakedown running — limited, private and carefully managed — isn’t where the grid sorts itself out. The first proper reference points will come in Bahrain, and even then you’re often comparing approaches rather than pure pace: fuel loads, engine modes, tyre usage, run plans, the works.
Lawson’s own focus is narrower and, from Racing Bulls’ perspective, more useful: “The main thing is, we’re getting the laps down that we want to and learning what we need to about our car.”
Bahrain, he expects, will shift the picture again — a different surface, different weather, a different demand profile. “We’re going to go to Bahrain on a very different track, with a very different climate as well,” he said. “It’s going to be great for us to learn how the car performs in very different places, different tracks.”
There’s another subplot here that’s hard to ignore: Lawson is now the experienced hand at Racing Bulls, and that’s a slightly surreal sentence considering how recently he was still fighting for a permanent seat. But in 2026 he leads a line-up that includes Lindblad, a British teenager stepping up from Formula 2 at the very moment F1’s technical ground is shifting beneath everyone.
Lawson was positive about the early dynamic between them, and the team will need that relationship to work. With cars this unfamiliar, driver feedback becomes even more valuable — not just for set-up tweaks, but for understanding fundamental behaviours and translating them into development direction. “It’s important to communicate well and work together on trying to basically build this car into as quick as possible,” Lawson said. “So far, it’s been good.”
For Lindblad, the task is obvious: learn fast without drowning in information. For Lawson, it’s different pressure — helping guide a programme while extracting enough performance to keep Racing Bulls in the fight as the new order forms. Being “the senior driver” isn’t just a label; it’s extra meetings, extra responsibility, and often less patience from the outside world if the car isn’t where it needs to be.
Barcelona, then, is best viewed as a decent first chapter rather than a verdict. Racing Bulls leaves with mileage, a sense of momentum, and a driver who sounds confident the car is moving in the right direction — while making it clear the rest of the paddock is, too.
The pecking order can wait. Right now, in Lawson’s world, the only metric that matters is whether the next time the VCARB 03 rolls out, it’s better than it was the last time.
