Liam Lawson names decision that 'destroyed' his Red Bull before brutal axe

Liam Lawson has recalled a decision made by he and his then-Red 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."