Liam Lawson’s version of his short-lived Red Bull stint is, in essence, a familiar F1 story with an unusually sharp edge: a team chasing answers with a difficult car, a rookie-ish teammate asked to take the risk, and a public narrative that — in his view — was then used to tidy up the consequences.
Speaking on the *High Performance* podcast, Lawson has pushed back hard at Red Bull’s framing of his demotion after just two race weekends of the 2026 season, insisting he wasn’t “mentally struggling” and that his Chinese Grand Prix weekend was compromised by a set-up roll of the dice the team actively wanted him to take.
Lawson arrived into 2026 already on the back foot. He’s said pre-season problems left him “under-prepared”, and the calendar opened with two venues he hadn’t raced at. In Melbourne he qualified 18th and then started from the pit lane after Red Bull changed his RB21 under parc fermé; in a messy race that claimed six drivers, Lawson ended up as the last of them in the wall.
Shanghai wasn’t kinder. He was last in Sprint qualifying, recovered to 14th in the Sprint itself, then qualified 20th for the Grand Prix. He finished 12th on Sunday — and within 24 hours, he was told he was heading back to Racing Bulls, with Yuki Tsunoda promoted to the senior seat.
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner presented it as a decision made with Lawson’s wellbeing in mind, saying at the time the team had a “duty of care” to protect a driver who had struggled. Horner later doubled down in comments to Sky Sports, describing how the situation was “affecting Liam quite badly” and claiming engineers had raised concerns about the weight on Lawson’s shoulders.
Lawson’s response is blunt: that explanation “could not be further from what it was actually like”.
The crux of his frustration is what happened between qualifying and the Chinese Grand Prix. Lawson says Red Bull wanted to try something “quite wild” — a significant set-up shift aimed both at giving him more confidence and at exploring direction with a car the team wasn’t happy with.
“We weren’t happy at all with the car, Max wasn’t happy,” Lawson said. “Everyone was like, this is not working, and we need to try something quite radical here.”
The plan, according to Lawson, was to start from the pit lane and “radically change the car” in a way you “would never do on a race weekend”. It was, he admits, a “shot in the dark”. It didn’t work.
But the sting, from his perspective, is the timing. Lawson says he flew back to the UK for simulator work and then received the call on the Monday that Red Bull was switching him out. The question that still irritates him is obvious enough: if his seat was effectively on the line, why lean into an extreme experiment that made his Sunday look worse on paper?
“I was like, ‘what? Why did we do…’” Lawson said, adding that the performance from that weekend was then used against him. “I won’t accept that you can judge me off that.”
It’s not just a driver complaining about a harsh call — plenty have done that. It’s the suggestion of an internal contradiction: Red Bull wanted data and a potential breakthrough, asked Lawson to be the one to take the pain, then used the messy outcome as part of the justification for removing him. Even for a team that’s never been sentimental about its second seat, it reads like a ruthless tidying-up operation.
Lawson also takes issue with how his public demeanour was interpreted. He says that during those early weekends he chose to front up, be “grateful”, and own the underperformance rather than argue. In his telling, that contrition was then repackaged externally into a storyline that he was buckling.
“The whole thing was played out to be me being mentally struggling and all this stuff, and like they were doing it to protect me,” he said. “That honestly just could not be further from what it was actually like.”
He’s also described how quickly that narrative took on a life of its own online — to the point he’s effectively shut Formula 1 out of his social media feeds, muting accounts en masse and relying on other people to tell him if anything significant is being said.
None of this changes the basic reality Red Bull was operating under: in the early weeks of a new season, with the team already dissatisfied with the RB21 and with Verstappen’s side of the garage hardly in the mood for patience, the second car became a pressure point. But Lawson’s comments illuminate the human cost of how these decisions are sold. “Duty of care” is a powerful phrase in public, especially when it implies safeguarding someone’s mental state. If Lawson is right that it simply wasn’t true, it’s not just a PR flourish — it’s a serious mischaracterisation.
For Lawson, the most convincing rebuttal has come the old-fashioned way: on track. Back at Racing Bulls, he’s emerged as the team’s leading driver this season, outscoring rookie team-mate Arvid Lindblad 28 points to 13 and helping the squad sit sixth in the constructors’ standings.
It doesn’t erase the opportunity he believes was taken away prematurely, nor the bitterness of how the explanation was framed. But it does, at least, give Lawson something solid to point at amid the noise: performance, momentum, and a reminder that in F1, reputations can be bruised quickly — and repaired just as quickly when the stopwatch starts telling a different story.
