Lawson says Red Bull gamble ruined final race

Liam Lawson says Red Bull put him on an extreme setup for the 2025 Chinese Grand Prix that “basically destroyed our race” after selling it as a move that would help his future, only to demote him to Racing Bulls days later.

Speaking on the High Performance Podcast, Lawson described a Saturday-night meeting in Shanghai in which Red Bull decided to start him from the pit lane and radically alter the car. “We made a massive, like, a change you would never do on a race weekend, like a normal change times 10,” he said, calling it “a kind of a shot in the dark” and admitting “the chance of it working over a race was very low.”

Lawson said he accepted the plan because the team presented it as more than a one-race fix. With him already set to start from the back, he said the idea was to try “something quite crazy” that might give a direction “for Liam and for the team going forward to make this car a bit easier to drive.”

Instead, he said, the experiment made the RB21 even worse. “The car was so hard to drive, and it just killed the fronts, and like basically destroyed our race,” Lawson said. At the time, he added, he went along with it because he believed there was a purpose behind sacrificing the result.

That decision came at the end of a two-race Red Bull stint Lawson says had already been undermined by poor preparation. He said he had only “half a day in Jerez before the season,” while Bahrain testing was “very compromised” by issues. He had never driven at Albert Park or Shanghai before those two rounds, and in Melbourne he also lost FP3 to an engine problem after Red Bull had planned two soft-tyre runs before qualifying.

Lawson said that left him trying to recover lost ground in a car he was still learning. He qualified 18th in Australia, then last for both the Sprint and Grand Prix in China. In Melbourne, he said he went into qualifying without any soft-tyre running, then overreached. “I made mistakes, and that's where, okay, I was unprepared going in, but I tried to make up for it, and locked up, went off, which I never do,” he said. “It was just stupid mistakes that I never do.”

China then brought the setup gamble that ended his time in the senior team. Lawson said he flew back to the UK for simulator work on “the Tuesday or Wednesday” after the race, expecting the exercise to feed into future progress, before the message changed abruptly. “And then on Monday I get the phone call: ‘We are switching you,’” he said.

The timing is what still jars most in Lawson’s account. “If you’d told me before the race that we were going to run this crazy car for your last race in a Red Bull, or we are going to run the setup that you run on a race weekend, what do you think I would have said?” he said.

Lawson said the demotion made him feel Red Bull had judged him on a result compromised by a team decision he had backed in good faith. “The performance was then used against me,” he said, adding that he would not accept being judged on “two races on two tracks that I’ve never been to.” He said the fallout was hard enough that he “even pretended like it never even happened” because “the way it all went down was just so crazy.”