Racing Bulls Formula One driver Liam Lawson has shed light on his demotion from Red Bull after the first two races of the 2025 season, exposing how an experimental setup on his RB21 F1 car was allegedly used against him.
Lawson’s promotion was announced after the 2024 season, following the ousting of Sergio Perez. Red Bull finalized its decision after assessing Lawson alongside Yuki Tsunoda in the second half of last year in its junior F1 team, Racing Bulls (then VCARB).
2025 marks Lawson’s first full-time season in the premier class of racing, but things took a drastic turn after Red Bull demoted him to Racing Bulls, swapping him for Yuki Tsunoda. The team took this major decision after the Grands Prix in Australia and China, where Lawson secured a DNF and P12.
Red Bull’s challengers have been reportedly tailored to suit Max Verstappen, and as a result, most of his teammates have often found it hard to adapt to the car. Lawson feels he wasn’t given enough time to get used to the car, and highlighted that the team’s preparation fell short of what a rookie driver would normally receive.
What made matters worse for him were the car’s reliability issues. When he agreed to try a different setup on the RB21 in China, thinking it would help him understand the car better, Red Bull used his performance in the race as the basis for his demotion. Speaking to RacingNews365, Lawson said:
“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.
“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.”
He added:
“In China, we took a shot in the dark with the set-up to try and learn something. 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.”
Red Bull has been facing problems with its car since mid-2024. In the current season, Verstappen’s performance continues to suffer since the team is unable to get the car in the right working window.
Tsunoda, who replaced Lawson, has also experienced a drop in performance since his promotion. While Lawson admitted that the car had issues, he wasn’t happy with his own performance either, which prompted him to look back and analyze if he could have done something differently. He added:
“There were a few things over that time that made it not smooth. 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.”
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