Liam Lawson says radical Red Bull set-up ‘destroyed’ his final race before demotion

Liam Lawson has revealed how a radical Red Bull set-up decision helped “destroy” his Chinese Grand Prix, just before he was unexpectedly dropped from the senior team.

Lawson reflects on a brutal Red Bull spell

The New Zealander had never previously driven at Albert Park or Shanghai, and he was trying to adapt to a difficult RB21 that, by his account, even Verstappen was not fully comfortable with. The episode remains a sharp example of how quickly pressure can build inside Red Bull’s driver structure, a theme that continues to surround the team’s wider performance discussions, including its more recent development questions around the Red Bull Austria upgrade.

“I just went into the first weekend very unprepared,” Lawson said. “I just kept telling myself that: ‘I’ll just deal with it, it’ll be fine.’”

China gamble backfires

Lawson’s Australian weekend had already unravelled after an engine issue cost him FP3, leaving him without soft-tyre running before qualifying. He said that contributed to mistakes he normally would not make.

China then presented another difficult scenario: a Sprint weekend at a circuit he had never driven. According to Lawson, Red Bull held a meeting on Saturday night to consider a major change to the car, aimed at giving both him and the team a clearer direction.

“Everyone was like: ‘This is not working, and we need to try something quite radical here,’” he recalled.

The team elected to start from the pit lane and make what Lawson described as a change far beyond a normal race-weekend adjustment — “a normal change times 10.”

‘It killed the fronts’

Lawson said the set-up was presented as a move that could help his future and guide the team’s development, even though the chances of it working across a race were low.

Instead, it made the car extremely difficult to drive.

“It sucked for this race,” he said. “The car was so hard to drive, and it just killed the fronts, and basically destroyed our race.”

The shock came afterwards. Lawson said he flew back to the UK expecting simulator work, only to receive the call confirming he would be replaced.

“I was like: ‘What?’” he said, questioning whether he would ever have accepted such an experimental set-up had he known it was his final Red Bull race.

Lawson has since rebuilt strongly at Racing Bulls and is currently 10th in the 2026 standings, with points in five of the first seven races.