Liam Lawson has pushed back firmly against the public story around his brief Red Bull spell, insisting his early-2025 demotion was not a move made to protect his mental strength.
The New Zealander lasted only two race weekends alongside Max Verstappen before being returned to Racing Bulls, a decision that has continued to sit awkwardly inside Red Bull’s wider second-seat debate. With the team heading into the Austrian Grand Prix still under pressure to prove its development direction, Lawson’s latest comments put that decision back under a sharper light.
Speaking on the High Performance podcast, and as reported by Motorsport.com, Lawson rejected suggestions that Red Bull moved him aside because he was struggling mentally with the role.
Lawson puts Red Bull’s call back under scrutiny
Lawson said the narrative around his exit was false, pointing instead to the lack of preparation before his promotion and a difficult China weekend that he believes counted heavily against him. He also described trying to treat the episode as if it had never happened, underlining how brutal the short Red Bull chapter felt from inside the cockpit.
That matters because Red Bull’s second car has become a recurring stress point rather than a solved problem. Readmotorsport has already looked at how Isack Hadjar described Red Bull’s second-seat curse, while the team’s longer-term driver planning has also been shaped by Arvid Lindblad’s growing role in Red Bull’s succession thinking.
The timing is awkward, too. Red Bull arrives at Spielberg with another major update under scrutiny, after its latest Austria package was already framed as a reality check for Verstappen and the RB22. Lawson’s comments do not change the stopwatch, but they do revive a harder question around the team: how much of its driver churn has been about individuals, and how much has been about the environment around them?
For Lawson, now rebuilt at Racing Bulls, this is not simply old frustration being aired again. It is a reminder that Red Bull’s biggest performance questions have rarely been confined to the car.
