Liam Lawson has been here before: a quickfire call-up, a stopwatch verdict, then the awkward business of waiting for the next opening in Red Bull’s crowded corridor. The difference in 2026 is that he isn’t waiting quietly.
Six race weekends into the new era, Lawson has dragged Racing Bulls into relevance often enough that he’s now sitting inside the top 10 in the Drivers’ Championship — a line on the standings that matters in a paddock that pretends it doesn’t read them. He’s on 26 points already, just 12 shy of what he banked across the whole of 2025, and his form has been the steadier pulse inside a team that’s still working out what it wants to be.
That matters because the noise around the Red Bull driver carousel never really stops; it just changes tempo. Lawson’s career has been defined by that tempo. Five races as a substitute in 2023. A six-race “audition” at the back end of 2024 after taking Daniel Ricciardo’s seat. A promotion to Red Bull Racing, then a demotion back to Racing Bulls after only two grands prix. Even when his results picked up late last year, it wasn’t enough to force the door open when Red Bull chose to replace Yuki Tsunoda at the end of 2025 — and handed the opportunity to Isack Hadjar instead.
Lawson could’ve been forgiven for treating 2026 as damage limitation: keep your head down, do the job, hope the next silly season storm blows in your direction. Instead, he’s made himself difficult to ignore.
Racing Bulls’ rookie Arvid Lindblad came out swinging with a top-10 finish on debut in Australia, but the rhythm since then has belonged to Lawson. Four points-scoring grands prix already, a proper headline-grabber with fifth in Monaco, and even a Sprint points finish in China — the sort of relentless collecting that doesn’t always make for glamorous copy, but does build reputations.
And reputations are what this is really about. It’s not just that Lawson’s scoring; it’s that he’s scoring consistently in a season where everyone is still learning the behaviour of new cars. When teams are wrestling with shifting traits from track to track, the driver who keeps finding clean weekends begins to look like more than a stopgap.
Asked in Barcelona whether this run has pushed him back into the frame for a top seat, Lawson did what every sensible Red Bull-affiliated driver does in June: he side-stepped it. No public lobbying, no thinly veiled ultimatums. But he didn’t hide the bigger point — that, for the first time in his stop-start time in F1, he feels properly equipped.
“You always learn, you always get better,” Lawson told media on Thursday. “So, for sure, I’m in a better place than I’ve ever been in Formula One.”
There’s a telling subtext in the way he frames the last couple of years. Lawson knows his path hasn’t been “normal” by modern standards, even in a sport that rarely does normal. Two late-season entries. A short-term shootout. Then last year as his first full campaign, one he admits began “very rocky”. Now, in 2026, he’s had what he didn’t have before: a proper pre-season, time to bed himself into a programme, and the chance to put the bruises to use.
“Obviously started very rocky, and I think this year had a proper pre-season, and with new cars, we’re all working on learning them, and I just think we’ve done a good job,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot from the last couple of years as well, and feel like I’ve sort of been able to put that to use this year.”
It’s the rare driver quote that rings true because it’s so unromantic. There’s no magic bullet, no new training method, no silver-tongued promise that he’s “unlocked something”. Lawson’s explanation for why this is working is simply: more reps, fewer distractions, better preparation.
“I don’t think it’s anything specific, other than just experience, honestly,” he said.
In Red Bull-land, that’s both encouraging and dangerous. Encouraging because it suggests his level is real, not a temporary spike. Dangerous because, if the ceiling is still moving upwards, it poses uncomfortable questions about what Red Bull did — and didn’t — give him when it shuffled the deck earlier. Two races at the senior team is scarcely an audition; it’s barely a sample.
The wider backdrop is impossible to ignore, too. Rumours that Max Verstappen could leave for Mercedes continue to swirl, and even if nobody publicly gives them oxygen, everyone in the paddock understands what a single contract tremor can do to the market. If a top seat opens anywhere, it tends to create a chain reaction rather than a single vacancy. Lawson doesn’t need to say his name should be in that conversation; he just needs to keep making it obvious.
For now, he’s careful not to tempt fate. He even admits the inevitable bad weekend is coming — because it always does.
“I know it’s motorsport, obviously a bad weekend is eventually going to come,” Lawson said. “But at the moment it’s been good. We’ve had good momentum, and I think as a team we’ve done a very, very good job, and I’m looking forward to trying to continue that.”
In other words: he’s not selling a fairytale, he’s selling credibility. And in Formula 1, credibility is what gets you the second chance you didn’t get the first time.
