Why Liam Lawson is thankful for Red Bull ruthlessness after uneasy wait for F1 2026 certainty

Liam Lawson has said he’s grateful for the relentless pressure put on him as a junior driver, as it’s enabled him to handle the pressure of uncertainty.

Lawson’s seat for the F1 2026 season was only confirmed in the days before the season finale in Abu Dhabi, with the Kiwi driver facing an enormous amount of pressure over whether he would secure a seat for next year.

Liam Lawson: I’m thankful to have gone through the pressure in the past

Lawson started the year with the senior Red Bull squad, having done enough towards the end of 2023 to convince then-senior management at Red Bull that he could handle stepping up alongside Max Verstappen.

While this promotion ultimately didn’t work out, with Lawson being moved back to Racing Bulls after just two races, the Kiwi recovered well at the sister team and began delivering upon his potential despite having had to readjust to life in a very different car to the one he had carried out pre-season preparations with.

Towards the end of the year, the uncertainty about the Racing Bulls seats began to mount. With Lawson’s teammate Isack Hadjar impressing to the point of appearing a shoo-in for a Red Bull promotion, Lawson was facing competition from the emerging Arvid Lindblad and a possible return for Yuki Tsunoda, meaning his seat was far from secure.

However, Lawson did enough to convince Red Bull that he was the right option, with Tsunoda being the driver to lose out as the Japanese driver was shuffled back to reserve driver status.

But, up until he was confirmed as continuing, Lawson faced intense public scrutiny as he faced media questioning about his future, with the 23-year-old shrugging off this potential distraction to deliver some strong results towards the end of the year.

The Red Bull junior driver programme, whose primary talent-spotter was the now-resigned Helmut Marko, has been well-known for its ruthlessness and unrelenting demands on drivers to perform consistently and strongly.

This happens at every level of the programme, as a means to check which drivers can cope with the pressure, even if it can look, from the outside, needlessly torturous for drivers in their formative teenage years.

For Lawson, having come out the other side to successfully make it into F1 and now finally establishing himself in the midfield, he said that he’s grateful for the approach taken by Marko and the programme.

“Maybe it’s a bit more knowing that there’s quite a lot of pressure in this team, I guess Red Bull is known for trying to put drivers under that extra bit of pressure to try and see how we deliver,” he told media, including PlanetF1.com, at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, when asked if the uncertainty of not knowing his future had affected him.

“But it’s something that we’ve honestly experienced for quite a long time.

“For us and for me, being a junior when I was young, I’ve now been six years with Red Bull, and my first year with them at 17 years old was already that. It wasn’t obviously this level, but it felt like it at the time.

“It felt like that kind of pressure when the conversations are, ‘You need to perform, otherwise you don’t have a future, ‘ and stuff like that.

“That’s the kind of stuff that we were experiencing at a young age.

“I’m thankful now to have gone through that, because, when we have these kinds of moments throughout the year, we’re talking about being re-signed for next year, it sort of feels like that level of pressure that I’ve actually dealt with before.”

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With Marko now departed, it remains to be seen whether the Red Bull junior driver programme continues to employ the same level of ruthlessness going forward.

At the senior team, Tsunoda was facing the same uncertainty, but unlike in late 2024, Lawson wasn’t entertaining the idea of securing a step-up back into Red Bull, despite having secured a similar promotion a year ago.

“It’s not, honestly, something I really thought about this year, especially with how when I came back [to Racing Bulls] it was a very tricky few races,” he admitted.

“I think, for the first part of this year, I was focusing on finding my feet again and getting used to this car.

“I’d missed the first part of the pre-season with the development where the car was going, and we actually made some changes to the car to make it a bit more comfortable for me during the season.

“So it’s honestly not something I really thought about.

“It was a little bit more pressure obviously, but I think I was in this position last year as well at the end of the season, and even still, actually up into Abu Dhabi.

“So I felt that I’ve been through it a few times before, and it doesn’t make it easy, but it’s something that we’re definitely used to in this team, in this environment.

“I mean, it’s always difficult, but it’s not new, honestly, it’s how I felt last year. It’s how I felt as a reserve, trying to get my first opportunity in Formula 1. It’s, I think, how you feel in Formula 1 until you really establish [yourself].”

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