Bull team that “destroyed” his car in his final race before his
shock 2025 demotion. Lawson was promoted by Red Bull into the
senior team for the start of the 2025 season, replacing Sergio
Perez alongside Max Verstappen, but only lasted two weekends before
he himself was demoted – back to Racing Bulls in a swap with Yuki
Tsunoda. Lawson had never driven at either Australia’s Albert Park
or China’s Shanghai circuits, in a difficult RB21 machine that even
Verstappen himself was toiling with, but following the China
weekend, Red Bull management, including Christian Horner and Helmut
Marko, elected to make the change with Tsunoda. The New Zealander
has now flourished at Racing Bulls and is currently 10th in the
2026 standings with points in five of the seven races thus far.
But recounting what happened in the spring of 2025, Lawson has
detailed how a radical Red Bull set-up change was made, with his
agreement, before it “destroyed” his Chinese GP – with the axe
falling on his career with the team the next day – much to his
shock. “I could have done a better job in some ways, but I think
the way we did no testing, I did half a day in Jerez before the
season, and even then, our Bahrain testing was very compromised as
well, we had some issues, and I just went into the first weekend
very unprepared,” Lawson told the High Performance Podcast. “I just
kept telling myself that: ‘I’ll just deal with it, it’ll be fine.’
I think we all back ourselves, but with how close it was last year,
like if I’m three-tenths off Max, I’m out in Q1. pretty much. “I
don’t think did a good job at all, but then maybe I could have done
a better job as well, and then in Melbourne, I had missed FP3 with
an engine issue, in which we had planned to do two soft tyre runs
before qualifying, so I went into qualifying with no soft tyre
running, and then I made mistakes, and that’s where, okay, I was
unprepared going in, but I tried to make up for it, and locked up,
went off, which I never do, like it was just stupid mistakes that I
never do. “I got knocked out, and then I’m starting the race at
the back. And then we went to China, and it was a Sprint weekend.
I’d never driven there, and it was just kind of the same kind of
thing, trying to just make up for lack of preparation, and just
mistakes, like little mistakes. “The race in China, we’d spoken
about basically trying something quite wild on the car to get some
comfort for me, also because the team at the time collectively we
weren’t happy at all with the car. Max wasn’t happy. Everyone was
like: “This is not working, and we need to try something quite
radical here.’ “And so we all kind of had a meeting on Saturday
night, and it was sort of decided, and I was on board with it,
because the idea was: ‘Let’s try something quite crazy, but it
might help get a direction for Liam and for the team going forward
to make this car a bit easier to drive.’ “So we decided to start
from the pit lane and basically radically change the car. We made a
massive, like, a change you would never do on a race weekend, like
a normal change times 10.” The article continues below. The set-up
changes Detailing the effects the changes had to his RB21, Lawson
explained that the radical set-up, “killed the fronts” and that his
termination from Red Bull came as a major surprise given what he
had been told about the set-up decision. “It was a kind of a shot
in the dark, and even if it works the chance of it working over a
race was very low, and I knew all of these things, but it was sort
of proposed to me as a “This is going to help you for the future,
and this is going to give us a bit more of a direction,” he said.
“We’re going to try this and you starting last in the race is kind
of done anyway, let’s just try something, and this will help you,’
and so I ran it. “And it sucked for this race, like the car was so
hard to drive, and it just killed the fronts, and like basically
destroyed our race, but honestly I didn’t care at the time, because
I was like: ‘There’s a reason we’ve done this, and then flew back
to the UK for simulator on whatever it was, a Tuesday or Wednesday,
and then on Monday I get the phone call: ‘We are switching you.’ “I
was like: ‘What?’ If you told me before the race: ‘Okay, we’re
going to run this crazy car for your last race in a Red Bull, or we
are going to run the setup that you run on a race weekend,’ what do
you think I would have said? “That at the time was like a really
hard thing to deal with, but then I had Japan literally the next
week or the week after, so I just didn’t have time to compress or
think about any of this, and I had to then go to VCARB and just try
and do the best, prepare and do the best job possible, but it made
that whole experience quite tough.”