Liam Lawson has spent enough time around modern Formula 1 to know what “busy” really means, so the idea that he’d quietly slipped into a Supercars entry list during the spring lull always felt a little too neat.
As it turns out, it was. The chatter that did the rounds in Australia and New Zealand — suggesting the Racing Bulls driver would pop up as a guest for the Taupō and/or Christchurch Super 440 events during F1’s extended break — was, in Lawson’s words, simply an April Fools’ prank that escaped the group chat and found oxygen.
“I landed in New Zealand, and my phone was blowing up with, ‘Oh, Liam, you’re racing supercars next week’,” Lawson laughed, speaking to media during the break. “I was like, ‘I don’t even know I was racing supercars next week, so I don’t really know how everybody else seems to know that I’m racing a supercar next week!’”
That it got traction at all tells you something, though. Not just about the internet’s willingness to believe anything, but about how believable the underlying premise is: Lawson genuinely fancies it.
“It’s a very, very cool idea,” he said. “It’s obviously a series that I’ve grown up watching, and I would love to do it at some point, for sure.”
What made the rumour particularly sticky was the timing. The Supercars championship is running two New Zealand-based rounds during the F1 gap — Taupō on April 10–11 and Christchurch on April 17–19 — and Lawson was home after the Japanese Grand Prix. Add in the recent trend of F1 drivers stretching their legs in other machinery during downtime, and you can see how the story wrote itself.
But Lawson was clear there’s no secret cameo brewing, and the reason is straightforward: Supercars isn’t the sort of thing you just rock up to between simulator days and debriefs.
“Obviously, when my life is not so focused on one thing, maybe, and I can actually put the time in to prepare for it would be cool,” he said. “But, obviously, no real truth to that one.”
Still, the interesting part isn’t that he’s not doing it this month — it’s how he talks about why he wants to.
Lawson isn’t hunting novelty for novelty’s sake. He’s drawn to Supercars because it’s one of the few top-level categories that still leans into the physical, slightly abrasive side of driving. In a paddock where everything is optimised, automated and modelled, he’s openly romantic about something that fights back.
“Supercars, especially, is something I’ve grown up watching, and I think the series is amazing,” Lawson said. “I think they do such a good job of keeping the cars raw.”
He reeled off the details like a fan who’s paid attention: naturally aspirated V8s, sequential gearboxes, and a deliberate refusal to drift towards the kind of driver aids that have become standard elsewhere.
“They’re not going towards paddle shifts and other things like three pedals; there’s no auto blip and stuff like that,” he said. “That sort of managing everything themselves — I think that’s just such a cool thing.”
For an F1 driver, that’s not just nostalgic talk. It’s a different skill-set, and arguably a different mindset. Lawson’s already had a taste: he’s driven a Triple Eight-built Chevrolet Camaro at Highlands Motorsport Park, in the same type of car Shane van Gisbergen raced — and the very Camaro owned by Triple Eight co-owner Tony Quinn, one of Lawson’s key backers. Before that, he sampled a Gen3 Supercar at Albert Park in 2024 in a Blanchard Racing Team Mustang.
He’s also seen what dabbling outside the grand prix bubble can do, for better and worse. In 2021 he ran a full season in DTM under GT3 rules and came within three points of the title, only for Maximilian Götz to swing it late with back-to-back wins at the Norisring. Lawson admits the ending still stings, but he rates the experience — including the sort of elbows-out racing F1’s rulebook and aerodynamic fragility increasingly discourage.
“Being a bit more aggressive, you know, throwing some dive bombs, slamming some doors… It was something we obviously can’t do too much in Formula 1,” he said. “So it was good fun.”
There’s also a wider point here that Lawson didn’t need to spell out: adaptability is currency for a driver whose career is still in the building phase. He’s already comfortable hopping between styles of car, and he traces that back to starting young.
“In New Zealand, I was driving a race car on a race track at 12 years old,” he said. “Before racing F4 in Europe… I had done, like, three years of circuit racing on a track.”
As for what he actually did during the break, it wasn’t exactly sponsor-lunch-and-golf stuff. Lawson went home, got some proper family time, and dealt with the sort of unglamorous admin that still manages to ambush an F1 driver mid-season.
“I was in New Zealand for over a week… I did have to go and get a new passport, which was successful!” he said. “So I can now travel for the rest of the season… we obviously fill up pages pretty quickly. It’s the second time I’ve needed to do this.”
He also rode plenty of dirt bikes on his own track — a reminder that, for all the polish of F1, plenty of its drivers still unwind by doing something that involves risk and throttle control rather than recovery boots and cold plunges.
Now he’s back in Europe, with the focus snapping to Miami and the usual arms race of upgrades and simulator work, split between Racing Bulls’ bases in Faenza and the UK.
Supercars will have to wait. But Lawson didn’t sound like someone making polite noises for a local headline. He sounded like a driver who misses the idea of a machine that doesn’t flatter you — and who, when his calendar finally loosens its grip, intends to go looking for one.
