Liam Lawson details Red Bull shock: 'That was used to demote me'

Liam Lawson has opened up on his demotion from Red Bull following his early departure from the Milton Keynes-based squad.

Following the exit of Sergio Perez at the end of the 2024 campaign, Lawson was promoted to the seat alongside Max Verstappen.

However, a disastrous opening two rounds of the campaign saw the New Zealander swiftly cast back to the sister Racing Bulls team.

Speaking exclusively to RacingNews365, Lawson suggested he was underprepared heading into the new venture before running into unexpected obstacles.

“If you look at how other teams have approached bringing a young driver in and you look at the test days, the time in the seat, the amount of testing that, for example, Kimi [Antonelli], has done in the past before racing this year - we didn't do any of that,” Lawson said.

“It was two weekends on two tracks I'd never raced at, one of them being a sprint weekend.

“They weren't smooth weekends. We had issues in Bahrain [testing] with reliability, we had issues in Melbourne with reliability.”

After qualifying 18th and retiring following a crash in Australia, Lawson travelled to China hoping for an uptick in form.

However, he qualified last and could not challenge for the points on race day during a weekend Red Bull opted to experiment with the car set-up in a bid to unlock pace.

Lawson detailed he was happy to go along with the plan as he believed it was to help him for the races following the Chinese Grand Prix.

“In China, we took a shot in the dark with the set-up to try and learn something,” Lawson said. 

“For me, I was under the understanding it was to help me develop for the future, to have an understanding of the car.

“So I was happy to drive with this sort of set-up. That performance was then used to demote me from the team, basically.”

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Liam Lawson 'naive' over Red Bull performance patience

Since returning to Racing Bulls, Lawson has enjoyed an uptick in form, including three point-scoring races in the last four grands prix.

The Red Bull car has been known to be difficult to drive with a narrow operating window, as Lawson's successor Yuki Tsunoda is also struggling to extract pace from the challenger.

While the car posed issues for Lawson, the 23-year-old admitted he was far from pleased with his own personal performance.

“There were a few things over that time that made it not smooth,” Lawson said. “It wasn't a clean couple of weekends.

“And by my own standards, they weren't good enough. I was obviously trying as hard as I could, and I was trying to get up to speed as quickly as I could.

“As much as I look back now and go, ‘What could I have done to do that better?’, there are obviously things you look back in hindsight and go, ‘I wish that I'd done this differently to try and help me’.

“If I knew I was going to get two races, I would have probably done things slightly differently. 

“But I didn't at the time. I was maybe a bit naive, but I thought I was going to get longer and have time to learn.”