Liam Lawson doesn’t need reminding that 2026 is meant to be the year he stops being a useful substitute and starts looking like a fixed point in Red Bull’s wider ecosystem. Racing Bulls are keeping him on, but the message from team principal Alan Permane is as blunt as it is revealing: make yourself impossible to drop.
Permane’s line isn’t the sort of throwaway encouragement teams dish out in February. It’s a challenge rooted in what Racing Bulls think Lawson can be — and what, too often, he still isn’t. The ceiling has never been the debate. The problem is the floor.
“He’s got to get to where we want to keep him here,” is the subtext of Permane’s assessment. Not as a holding pen for the next Red Bull call-up, not as the convenient answer when the senior team’s in a bind, but as a driver you build around because the alternative hurts. “I want him to deliver so that we think, ‘Wow, we’ve got to hang on to this guy. He’s really good.’”
That’s a very particular kind of compliment in F1: the kind that carries an ultimatum.
Lawson has lived a strange, stop-start version of the modern Red Bull career path. He debuted in 2023, did more stand-in work across 2023 and 2024, then began 2025 at the senior Red Bull team — only to be sent back to Racing Bulls after two race weekends. Those two weekends are now ancient history in a paddock sense, but they still hover over his profile: evidence that he can get caught in the undertow when the water turns choppy.
Racing Bulls, however, have seen enough to believe there’s something sharper in there. Permane pointed to qualifying in Baku and Las Vegas last season as snapshots of “real genius” — not just speed, but the sort of controlled aggression that makes engineers sit up because it suggests a driver is doing more than following the car.
Baku was the cleaner headline: third on the grid and a fifth-place finish in the race. In Las Vegas, the detail that will have mattered internally was the margin to his then team-mate Isack Hadjar — half a second in qualifying on a weekend where small mistakes were punished hard. Hadjar has since been promoted to the senior Red Bull seat for 2026, which only sharpens the comparison Racing Bulls will inevitably be making in the background.
Permane also referenced strong races at Spa, Hungary and Austria in 2025. Again, not “he was fine”, but “he was brilliant” — the language a team uses when it’s trying to coax an elite version of a driver into showing up more often.
Because here’s the sting: Permane’s real concern isn’t that Lawson is slow. It’s that the bad days sometimes arrive without explanation, even to the driver.
“Sometimes inexplicably, he will go out and Q1, and he doesn’t understand it,” Permane said. That’s the sort of admission that would make any driver wince, because it’s not just about results — it’s about process. The modern midfield is too tight, and 2026’s fresh technical cycle will only amplify volatility early on. If you can’t diagnose your dips, you can’t stop them happening again. And if you can’t stop them, you end up defined by them.
Permane’s prescription is simple: keep the good stuff coming, but cut out the unexplained lows. Do that, and confidence — and performance — tends to compound. “Once you can do that, the rest will start snowballing and improve.”
Lawson’s timing is awkward, too. Racing Bulls aren’t just asking him to stabilise; they’re putting him next to a rookie with serious internal momentum. Arvid Lindblad arrives as his new team-mate, an 18-year-old Brit with the kind of junior-ladder rise that makes Red Bull people talk in absolutes. His raw pace is not the question. What still needs proving is how he handles the weekend-to-weekend pressure when F1 stops being a sequence of “next opportunities” and becomes a grind of judgement, noise, and expectation.
That dynamic flips the usual script for Lawson. For the first time in a while, he’s the experienced hand — the one expected to set the baseline, guide development feedback, and score the points when things get messy. But he’s also the easier driver to move on, should Racing Bulls decide it wants its future to be Lindblad-shaped. That’s not sentiment; that’s how Red Bull’s driver economy works.
So yes, a good relationship across the garage matters. But Lawson can’t afford to be polite in performance terms. He needs to put Lindblad under immediate, relentless pressure: out-qualify him, control the Sundays, and make it obvious to the people upstairs that the “known quantity” is worth more than the “next big thing”. If he does that, he doesn’t just protect his seat — he changes how the organisation talks about him.
Racing Bulls CEO Peter Bayer has already indicated Lawson’s renewal came after he “stabilised” his level following that brutal two-weekend spell at Red Bull early in 2025. The problem is that “stabilised” is a baseline word. It’s what you say when someone stops bleeding points. It isn’t what you say about a driver you fear losing.
Permane, perhaps unintentionally, has laid out the entire brief for Lawson’s 2026: take those flashes — Baku, Vegas, the best of Spa and Hungary — and turn them into routine. Cut out the anonymous Saturdays that drop you into Q1 without warning. And, with a hyped teenager now on the other side of the garage, make the team feel like letting you go would be a mistake they’d regret.
That’s what “undroppable” really means in this paddock. Not safe. Not liked. Not even necessarily promoted. Just too valuable to discard.
