Liam Lawson didn’t need a TV replay to make his point in Montreal. The Racing Bulls driver had already spent enough laps staring at the rear of Sergio Perez’s Cadillac to decide the blue flags weren’t being policed with anything like the urgency you’d expect in a Formula 1 race.
Untelevised radio from the Canadian Grand Prix has now filled in the blanks on one of those small, easily missed moments that nevertheless tells you plenty about the temperature between two drivers who simply don’t get on — and haven’t for a while.
Lawson’s frustration came as he charged through the field to finish seventh, matching his best result of the 2026 season after starting 12th. Around lap 32, he caught Perez to put the Cadillac a lap down, only to find the process far more cumbersome than it should’ve been.
“Perez is blue flag,” Lawson’s engineer Alexandre Iliopolous warned.
“He’s just getting in the way,” came the reply — blunt, annoyed, and very much on-brand for a driver who rarely bothers with diplomatic padding on the radio.
On the other side of the conversation, Perez was asking his own question: “Why he doesn’t go?” His engineer Carlo Pasetti tried to calm it down, telling him the team had seen Perez “giving space” and to “try again”.
That, really, is the heart of it: two drivers each convinced the other is the problem, playing out yet another chapter of a relationship that’s been prickly since the end of 2024. Back then, Lawson made headlines in Mexico with a middle finger aimed squarely at Perez, at a time when Lawson was being talked up as the man most likely to take Perez’s Red Bull seat. The team duly made the change for 2025, and Perez spent that entire season on the sidelines.
Lawson’s own Red Bull stint, of course, was brutally short — two races before Yuki Tsunoda took over for the rest of 2025. By the time the grid reset for 2026, Perez was back, signed by new entrant Cadillac. And in the way F1 loves to arrange its little ironies, the two were immediately thrown into each other’s orbit again.
Their season-opening run-in in Australia set the tone, with Lawson heard branding Perez with a memorable appraisal after a heated battle. Canada didn’t have the same wheel-to-wheel theatre, but it did have the kind of rulebook friction that winds drivers up: the sense that the system is working too slowly, and the car in front is exploiting it.
As the sequence dragged on in Montreal, green boards flashed after an incident ahead. Lawson, now properly irate, queried why Perez and the car in front weren’t being hammered with the instruction.
“Mate, what are they doing?” he demanded.
Iliopolous replied that both cars ahead were under blue flags. Lawson wasn’t buying it. “They are literally not getting any blue flags.”
Only moments later did the situation finally resolve itself. A trackside board clearly showing Perez’s number 11 came into view, and the Cadillac eased off to let Lawson through approaching the Turn 10 hairpin.
Perez’s afternoon ultimately ended with retirement following a suspension failure, but not before he’d irritated another key figure in the race. On lap 42, winner Kimi Antonelli was also left fuming when Perez didn’t yield cleanly through the Turns 8/9 chicane.
“What is this guy doing, man?” Antonelli was heard saying — the sort of comment that tends to travel quickly up and down the pit lane, especially when it comes from the driver who’s on the way to victory.
None of this will be news to anyone who’s raced Perez hard over the years: he’s rarely a soft touch in traffic, and he’ll always argue his corner. But the Montreal radios underline how quickly a routine blue-flag situation can turn into something personal when there’s already history in the room.
Lawson, for his part, will take the points and the momentum. Seventh from 12th is exactly the kind of understated, high-efficiency Sunday he needs in a season where Racing Bulls has been fighting for relevance in the midfield scrap. Yet even with a strong result, he still ended up spending mental energy on Perez — and in this business, that’s often the real cost.
As for Perez, the Cadillac project is still in its first season and already living on a tight margin: learn fast, finish races, don’t give rivals free reasons to complain. Getting under the skin of a Racing Bulls driver while being lapped — and then doing the same to the race leader later on — isn’t the most helpful way to keep your weekends tidy.
Montreal may go down as just another minor flashpoint, but it’s also a reminder that some rivalries don’t need contact to spark. Sometimes a set of blue flags and a stubborn car in the wrong place is enough.
