Liam Lawson has accused Red Bull of using the outcome of an experimental set-up in the Chinese Grand Prix as justification to sideline him from its Formula 1 line-up.
With just 11 races under his belt at the Austrian outfit’s junior squad, the New Zealander was trusted to partner Max Verstappen for the 2025 season, replacing Sergio Perez.
However, his time in the spotlight was short-lived. Lawson struggled from the outset, qualifying 18th on his debut in Australia before crashing out of the race.
In China, he qualified last and finished outside the points, leaving the team with little choice but to act swiftly.
Red Bull immediately replaced him with Yuki Tsunoda, sending Lawson back to the sister team after just two races.
Back with Racing Bulls, Lawson has enjoyed a return to form, securing back-to-back point finishes before the summer break.
But he has not shied away from speaking out about the challenges he faced during his brief stint at Red Bull and the decisions he feels left him at a disadvantage.
Reflecting on the weekend that sealed his fate, the 23-year-old revealed how he felt the team set him up to fail.
“In China, we took a shot in the dark with the set-up to try and learn something,” he told RacingNews365.
“For me, I was under the understanding that 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.”
Lawson admits he felt underprepared for Red Bull promotion
The tweak made by the team was intended to help him get up to speed with the RB21.
Lawson, however, felt he didn’t receive the same planning and preparation time as other rookies received
He named checked Mercedes’ Andrea Kimi Antonelli specifically and also pointed towards reliability issues as a factor behind his downfall.
“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 has done in the past before racing this year – we didn’t do any of that,” he explained.
“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.”
Despite the setback, Lawson admits the experience was far from smooth and acknowledges areas where, in hindsight, he could have done things differently.
“There were a few things over that time that made it not smooth,” he added. “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.”
READ MORE – The Max Verstappen regret Liam Lawson harbours over short-lived Red Bull F1 spell
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