Liam Lawson pinpoints Red Bull difference behind Dutch GP turnaround
Liam Lawson has detailed exactly how he's found form on his Red Bull return.
ZANDVOORT – Liam Lawson has explained how tailoring the Red Bull as “close as possible” to what he wanted has helped him thrive upon his return to the senior team at the Dutch GP.
Isack Hadjar’s absence this weekend with a broken wrist has seen Lawson parachuted back into the Red Bull seat that he was dropped from two rounds into the 2025 season.
Liam Lawson explains Red Bull difference
With a single practice hour to get to grips with the RB22 around the challenging and unforgiving Zandvoort circuit, Lawson was braced to encounter a steep learning curve.
But while that was realised in Sprint Qualifying as he missed out on a spot in SQ3 and ended the Sprint Race outside the points, the New Zealander rallied to secure eighth place on the grid for Sunday’s race, little more than a tenth behind team-mate Max Verstappen.
“It’s been very challenging to try and build up in a short space of time,” Lawson told PlanetF1.com and other accredited media.
“But obviously the target was to keep improving for the weekend, and I think by quali I think that was a good job from everybody to help me get comfortable in the car, or as comfortable as possible.
“And for me, I feel like I extracted pretty much everything I had out of the car.”
Lawson’s dream opportunity with Red Bull’s senior team descended into a nightmare last season as back-to-back point-less weekends with consecutive Q1 eliminations prompted him to be demoted back to satellite squad Racing Bulls after two rounds.
The Kiwi believes that his much-improved showing in this unexpected cameo can be attributed to the outing coming on a track where he has previous experience, as well as Red Bull’s 2026 challenger being more predictable than its capricious predecessor.
“I think last year was a season where it was obviously extremely close,” he recounted.
“The cars were the last year of their regulation, so they were fully developed, not really much more to improve in them. And at the start of the year, overall, the car was very difficult to drive.
“And on top of that, I mean Melbourne and China I’d never been to; China was a Sprint weekend. There’s plenty of things that happened over those weekends that didn’t help us honestly, and then that was it.
“With more time, obviously I feel like I would have adjusted to the car and got used to it.
“But coming into this weekend, I’ve had a lot more races in Formula 1.
“Outside of that, I think it’s just having a bit more experience, trying to prepare this weekend. I’ve been here before. Maybe just a bit more confidence as a driver.”
However, Lawson, who has since rebuilt his reputation at Racing Bulls, also divulged that having the confidence to adapt the Red Bull more to his liking than he did in his initial spell with the squad has been vital in helping him to unlock the car’s potential.
“I’ve also learned a lot,” he expanded. “Just personal things.
“I went into last year, obviously thought I was going to have more time in the car, so I was more or less just adapting to everything that Max had.
“There’s a lot of stuff, just like pedals, steering, everything like that that was different for me that I didn’t have time to get used to.
“This weekend, I just said, ‘Let’s make it as close to my car as possible, and forget everything that he has, and try and make it as close to my car, feeling-wise’. And I think that helps.”
Lawson added that his impressive stand-in appearance has vindicated his long-held credence that he would have succeeded with Red Bull had he been given more time.
“It’s great,” he expressed. “I mean, obviously for me, it’s something I’ve always known internally.
“For me, that different circumstances and things would have gone differently, but obviously, maybe to you guys, to the world, now you can see it as well.”
Reporting by Taylor Powling, additional reporting by Thomas Maher
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