In Formula 1, the coldest moments aren’t always the ones played out over the radio. Sometimes they’re the quiet, awkward weeks when everyone in the paddock knows what’s coming — and the only people who have to live through it in real time are the drivers involved.
Liam Lawson has spoken candidly about those weeks, and about the way Daniel Ricciardo handled a situation that, ultimately, ended with Lawson taking his seat not once but twice at Red Bull’s second team.
The first time was sudden. Zandvoort 2023, when the team still carried the AlphaTauri name, Ricciardo crashed in Friday practice and broke a metacarpal bone in his left hand. Lawson, who’d been pushing hard for a proper chance after finishing third in the 2022 Formula 2 championship and fighting for the Super Formula title, was the obvious reserve — but “obvious” doesn’t mean “easy” when you’re throwing a rookie into a tricky weekend on short notice.
Lawson recalled on the Gypsy Tails podcast that, only hours before Ricciardo’s FP2 crash, he’d been pressing Helmut Marko in blunt terms. Not the usual polite, career-managed driver programme conversation — more the kind of frustration you get when you feel you’ve done the work and the door still isn’t opening.
He said he was “quite aggressively” asking what more he could do. Marko, in Lawson’s retelling, pushed back by referencing a Super Formula crash. Lawson’s reply was essentially that the results were there: he’d been winning, more than anyone else that season, and that Red Bull wouldn’t know until they actually gave him a chance.
Then Ricciardo hit the wall, and the theory became reality.
Lawson was at the Red Bull garage when the crash happened, and the call came quickly. Post-session, he was told he was in the car for FP3. He believes that earlier confrontation with Marko mattered, because there were voices in the mix who were hesitant about dropping a rookie into Zandvoort. When he later found Marko talking with then-team principal Franz Tost, the exchange was brutally simple.
Marko looked at him: “You ready?”
Lawson: “Yep.”
Conversation over. Lawson walked away thinking: *Holy smokes.*
He raced at Zandvoort and stayed in the car for another four grands prix before Ricciardo returned. And that should’ve been the end of the story — a solid stand-in stint, a useful audition, and back to waiting.
But F1 rarely keeps things that neat.
Ricciardo kept his place for 2024, yet by the Singapore Grand Prix the situation had reached its second, more personal turning point. Singapore turned out to be Ricciardo’s final race with the team and, as it played out, his last appearance in Formula 1. Lawson took over from the United States Grand Prix.
That second swap is the one that carries the emotional weight. Lawson admitted it “sucked” being around it all in Singapore — and was quick to add it was obviously far worse for Ricciardo. What stands out is that Lawson isn’t telling a story of tension, bitterness, or the awkward professional frost you might expect when one driver is effectively the other’s replacement.
He’s describing the opposite.
According to Lawson, Ricciardo never once aimed any negativity his way. No passive-aggressive digs. No politicking. No “you’ll understand when you’re older” condescension. Just a straightforward line, delivered early: Ricciardo wanted Lawson to know there was nothing personal in it, that Lawson wasn’t the enemy, and that the situation was separate from him.
It’s the kind of thing you don’t have to do — and, in truth, plenty wouldn’t. Drivers are competitive by design, and the sport isn’t built to cushion anyone’s exit. Ricciardo, though, chose to take the pressure out of the relationship, even while he was the one losing the seat.
Lawson said Ricciardo has kept that same openness since. He’s called him for advice, and Ricciardo has picked up, talked things through, and offered guidance over the past couple of years.
There’s an underappreciated detail there. In a paddock where careers are often decided by timing and ruthlessness, mentorship can be complicated — especially when the mentee is the one benefitting from your misfortune. For Lawson, it could easily have been a strange dynamic: the “spectre” over Ricciardo’s future, the reserve waiting in the wings, the name that keeps coming up whenever performance and politics converge.
Instead, Lawson paints Ricciardo as someone who separated the machinery of team decisions from the human relationship. That doesn’t change what happened, but it changes how it felt to the people inside it — and how it will be remembered.
Ricciardo, inactive after his F1 exit, retired from motor racing in 2025 and became a global ambassador for Ford Racing. Lawson, meanwhile, carries forward as one of the drivers forged in that particularly Red Bull way: impatient for opportunity, direct with the people who control it, and ready to jump with almost no notice.
But the part of this story that lingers isn’t the “You ready?” moment — it’s that, in the most unforgiving corner of F1’s driver market, the guy being replaced chose decency over spite, and the guy stepping in didn’t forget it.
