Liam Lawson is back at Zandvoort this week with a very different brief: no longer the rookie thrown into a storm, but RB’s full‑time driver arriving with a full season’s rhythm behind him. Even so, the place still carries a jolt. Two years on from his sudden 2023 debut here, Lawson admits those first laps in F1 came not with wonder but with a knot in his stomach.
Called up halfway through the weekend after Daniel Ricciardo broke a metacarpal avoiding Oscar Piastri’s stricken McLaren in FP2, Lawson climbed into an AlphaTauri that wasn’t set up for him, on a track that punishes hesitation, with weather that punished everyone. He spun in FP3 and qualified slowest. Then came the race: rain, slicks, more rain, and a 45‑minute red flag before a brief sprint to the flag. He steered the car to 13th and breathed out.
“I don’t think it’s good memories,” he said this week, reflecting before the Dutch Grand Prix. “My memories of that weekend were just fear and pressure.” There’s no bravado in the retelling. Just the blunt reality of a reserve driver’s life: you prepare endlessly hoping you’ll never be needed, and when you are, it’s usually because something has gone wrong for someone else.
“It was just a very tough weekend,” Lawson continued. “I was relieved to get through it. I learned a lot from it going into the next few races. But it wasn’t a fun weekend. Qualifying was very tricky; the race was even trickier. There were maybe 20 laps where it dried, I found a rhythm and enjoyed it—then it rained again and we had the red flag.”
He still left an impression. That five‑race cameo yielded points in Singapore with a tidy ninth place and a certain calm under fire, the kind that tends to get noticed inside Red Bull’s world. Now, in 2025, he’s on the grid full‑time with RB and returns to the same banked, boisterous amphitheatre looking to turn experience into something more tangible.
Zandvoort has that effect on drivers—its old‑school narrow ribbon and steeply cambered turns amplify every misjudgment and reward the brave. Add North Sea weather and restarts and it becomes a test of nerve as much as speed. Lawson’s first lap here was a survival exam. His next one will be an audit of how far he’s come.
The Kiwi doesn’t dress it up. There was no joy in the chaos of 2023, just a job to do and a car to keep out of the barriers. That he did, without tearing up the scenery, was the base layer. The points in Singapore were the proof. The rest—winning a permanent seat, turning potential into points on Sundays—was always going to be a longer project.
Perspective helps. Plenty of drivers romanticize their debuts after the fact. Lawson refuses to. He’s matter‑of‑fact about what it was: hurried, messy, and, yes, frightening. He’s also clear about what it gave him. When you’ve been shoved into an F1 car on Saturday and told to survive a wet Zandvoort Grand Prix 24 hours later, a standard race weekend starts to feel almost generous.
So what now? RB needs consistent scores to stay in the midfield fight, and Lawson knows this is the sort of place where a clean Saturday can set up a useful Sunday—track position counts double here. He’s not the wide‑eyed stand‑in anymore; he’s the guy expected to deliver, even when the wind starts whipping off the dunes and the radar turns ugly. And if it does? He’s already sat this exam once.
Two years ago the story was fear and pressure. This weekend, Lawson’s chasing a better chapter—one written at his pace, on his terms, with more than a few lessons learned from the day Zandvoort first handed him the keys.
