Liam Lawson doesn’t talk like a driver who’s still licking wounds. If anything, the sting of his two-race Red Bull cameo has sharpened his sense of what the job actually demands — and who, inside that famously unforgiving ecosystem, bothered to treat him like a person rather than a data point.
The New Zealander’s promotion for 2025 was supposed to be the payoff: he’d beaten off Daniel Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda for the seat alongside Max Verstappen, stepping into the most pressurised cockpit on the grid as Sergio Perez’s replacement. Two weekends later — Q1 exits in Australia and China, no points, the story already racing away from him — he was back at Racing Bulls. Red Bull dressed it up as protection, with Christian Horner talking about a “duty of care” as it became “difficult” to watch Lawson struggle. The paddock, unsurprisingly, had a different read: ruthless, impatient, borderline self-defeating.
That’s where Verstappen’s small public act landed with such force. When former F1 driver Giedo van der Garde accused Red Bull of something “closer to bullying or a panic move” on Instagram, Verstappen hit like. It was a tiny tap of a thumb, but in a sport where everyone’s trained to keep the company line, it might as well have been a press release.
Verstappen later made it clear it wasn’t accidental. He liked the message, he agreed with it, and he’d already shared his feelings internally. Publicly, he kept it brief: not everything needs to be aired. But the point was made — and everyone in the pitlane understood who it was aimed at.
Lawson has now filled in the human detail behind the headlines. Speaking on the High Performance podcast, he described Verstappen as “very, very supportive” not just during the demotion but in the years leading up to it, when Lawson was a reserve driver waiting for a door to open.
“In general, Max was just always very real,” Lawson said, the tone more surprised than performative. He talked about Verstappen taking an interest in his F2 season, asking how the car felt, what Lawson was learning, where he was struggling. Not a grand mentorship programme, not a PR-friendly buddy act — just the grid’s benchmark driver doing the basic things that, in a cut-throat environment, too many people don’t.
When Lawson finally landed in the Red Bull seat, he wasn’t arriving with the chest-thumping fantasy some rookies sell themselves. He admits he wasn’t walking in thinking he’d “beat him straight away”, calling that mindset “such a stupid thing to do”. What excited him was the chance to sit in the same machinery and effectively receive “a driving lesson from the best in the sport”.
That line matters, because it speaks to the core problem with Red Bull’s conveyor belt: the second seat has become less a normal team-mate role and more a live-fire exam. If you’re trying to copy Verstappen, you’re probably already lost — the margins he lives in don’t translate neatly driver-to-driver, and the cost of getting it wrong is usually a weekend, not a corner.
Lawson has a perfect story for that, one that predates the whole Red Bull saga and explains why Verstappen can be such a destructive reference point even when he’s not trying to be. He rewound to Zandvoort, FP3 in 2023, wet conditions, his first proper outing in an AlphaTauri after Ricciardo broke his hand. Lawson was learning the car, learning the track, learning intermediate tyres — all while trying to look like he belonged.
Then Verstappen came past and did Verstappen things: a casual-looking power slide on the limit, a move that tells every other driver on track either “come with me” or “don’t bother”.
Lawson watched it and thought, quite sensibly, there was “no way” he could do that right now. Then he did what every ambitious driver does when they smell the pace: he tried anyway.
“I’m gonna send it,” he remembered thinking. He spun.
That’s the trap. Verstappen’s commitment level is so high that copying the line without having the same confidence — the same sense of where the limit actually is — doesn’t just cost time, it costs you the car. Lawson’s description of modern F1 is blunt: at 99%, you’re slow. And if you’re slow at Red Bull, you’re not “building” — you’re failing.
What Lawson seems to appreciate, looking back, is that Verstappen understood that dynamic better than anyone. The four-time world champion didn’t need to perform sympathy; he just needed to be straight. Lawson says he spoke to “a lot of people” during the demotion storm, but he also spoke directly to Verstappen — and the support was real.
There’s another edge in Lawson’s comments too, one that will ring loudly for anyone who’s watched Verstappen race over the past few seasons. Lawson calls him “different to race against”, describing a mindset of “you either back out or you crash”. It’s not framed as a complaint; it’s more like a driver’s acknowledgement of the terms and conditions. You can disagree with that style, but you can’t pretend it isn’t effective — and you can’t pretend it doesn’t shape how everyone else behaves around him.
In a way, Verstappen backing Lawson — privately and with that pointed ‘like’ — is the most interesting part of this entire episode. Not because it makes him a saint, but because it shows how the sharpest competitor in the building saw the demotion for what it was: a decision that might protect a spreadsheet, but doesn’t necessarily protect a driver.
And Lawson? He’s still here, still racing, still sounding like someone who’s learnt quickly that in the Red Bull universe, you don’t just need speed. You need timing, political weather, and a tolerance for being judged before the ink’s dry on your contract. The irony is that the one person least threatened by him — Verstappen — appears to have been the one most willing to help.
