Liam Lawson blames Red Bull for 2025 axing

Former Red Bull F1 driver Liam Lawson has blamed the Milton Keynes based-outfit's unpreparedness for his failure at the team.

Lawson only lasted two races with the main Red Bull team, before being demoted back down to race at sister team Racing Bulls alongside rookie Isack Hadjar.

The New Zealander had originally replaced veteran Sergio Perez, and was seen as the future of the team with questions surrounding Max Verstappen's long-term future becoming more and more prevalent.

However, after two point-less finishes, Lawson was given the boot, replaced by Yuki Tsunoda, who has not fared much better.

In fact, Tsunoda has scored just seven points in 12 races for Red Bull, and Lawson is now ahead of the Japanese racer in the drivers' championship after being rejuvenated at Red Bull, scoring 20 points in the same time frame.

Now, as his stock begins to rise once more in F1, Lawson has revealed why he failed at Red Bull, and why Mercedes youngster Kimi Antonelli has done so well in his rookie season.

"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," he told RacingNews365 in a cheeky dig at Red Bull.

"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."

Will Lawson be promoted once more?

Red Bull's 2026 driver lineup is still up for debate, despite Verstappen having confirmed his future.

Tsunoda is only contracted until the end of 2025, and it can be argued that his performances this season do not warrant a contract extension.

That would then likely lead to a promotion for either Hadjar or Lawson, and new Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies will have to choose between the tried and tested in Lawson, and the unknown quantity in Hadjar.

French youngster Hadjar is currently ahead of Lawson in the drivers' championship, sat up in 13th on 22 points, but he has previously admitted that he would not be ready for a promotion just yet.

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