Liam Lawson has learned, the hard way, that in Red Bull’s orbit there’s no such thing as a quiet season. You can be the guy who kept his head when Daniel Ricciardo broke his hand, you can win the audition for the biggest seat of them all, and you can still find yourself back where you started before the year’s even warmed up.
Now, as the 2026 summer storylines start to sharpen, Lawson is once again the name being paired with a question mark — not because his form has dipped, but because the conveyor belt behind him is moving, as it always does. Nikola Tsolov’s Formula 2 run has put him firmly in the conversation for a Racing Bulls promotion next season, and the paddock has done what the paddock does: look at the team’s current line-up and start counting chairs.
Racing Bulls boss Alan Permane hasn’t exactly doused the speculation. Asked about Tsolov, he framed it as an enviable situation: too many good drivers, too little time. He described the Bulgarian as someone who’ll “very soon be knocking on the door”, praising the job he’s doing and making clear the team is tracking him closely. With Tsolov sitting second in F2 with four wins after six rounds, it’s not hard to see why that door is getting louder.
But if there was an attempt to turn that into a referendum on Lawson, Permane wasn’t interested.
“Liam has been amazing this year, honestly,” he said, and it didn’t sound like the sort of dutiful quote a team principal gives to stop a fire spreading. It sounded like a man listing the criteria Racing Bulls actually values — and, pointedly, ticking them off one by one.
Lawson is still only in his second full season in Formula 1, yet his career already reads like three separate arcs stitched together. The super-sub reputation from 2023 set the table. The six-race shootout for a Red Bull Racing seat the following year raised the stakes. Then came the part that still rankles: he won the fight, landed alongside Max Verstappen for 2025, and was demoted back to Racing Bulls just two races into that season — a decision Lawson has said he considered unfair.
Whatever you think about that call, it left a mark. His first year back at Racing Bulls was, by the team’s own admission, complicated by the fallout. But 2026 has been a different proposition: more stable, more settled, and crucially his first season in which he’s had a full pre-season with the team he’s actually racing for. In F1, that matters more than people like to admit when they’re trying to sound tough.
The results are doing the talking. Lined up against rookie team-mate Arvid Lindblad — already hyped in the Red Bull system, and previously labelled by Helmut Marko as the “next world champion” — Lawson has only finished behind him once. In the drivers’ standings, he’s ahead 30 points to 14.
That’s the detail that makes the current chatter slightly jarring. Racing Bulls has, effectively, what it says it wants: a lead driver delivering clean weekends, converting chances when they appear, and keeping the points flow steady while the other side of the garage learns how to do F1 properly. Permane’s description of Lawson was almost a checklist for job security in a junior team that’s tired of unforced errors: focused, still very quick, opportunistic, and not making mistakes.
Permane also alluded to last year’s intra-team yardstick, pointing out that Lawson had to measure himself against Isack Hadjar, who he called an “extraordinary talent”. The implication was clear enough: Lawson’s been through high-level comparisons inside the Red Bull pool, and he’s come out of them with credibility intact.
None of that automatically protects him from the larger machinery. Racing Bulls exists in a constant state of dual purpose — racing team on Sunday, talent workshop every other day of the week — and when a junior driver starts stacking wins, the internal conversation inevitably shifts from “when” to “where”. If Tsolov is genuinely ready, someone will have to make space somewhere in that ecosystem.
The immediate assumption is that Lawson is the obvious candidate to be moved aside because he’s already been moved aside once. But that’s exactly why this moment feels more like a test of Red Bull’s decision-making than a judgement on Lawson’s driving. If a team is publicly describing a driver as delivering “exactly everything we have asked of him”, and privately floating the idea of replacing him anyway, it tells you the pecking order isn’t purely performance-led — it’s also about timing, politics, and how loudly the next prospect is banging on the door.
For Lawson, the irony is that he’s finally getting the season he should’ve had earlier: continuity, a clearer role, and a chance to build rather than just survive. For Racing Bulls, he’s become the reference point that makes the operation function. And for Tsolov, the opportunity is obvious — but so is the risk of promoting another driver into a seat that’s being filled by someone doing the job properly.
Permane, at least, is making the team’s stance plain in public: Tsolov’s rise is being watched, but Lawson’s current level isn’t being treated as collateral damage. Whether that remains true once the internal meetings begin in earnest is where the real story sits. In this programme, you’re rarely judged only on what you’ve done — you’re judged on who’s coming next, and how impatient the system feels.
