Liam Lawson reveals Mexico abuse fallout

Liam Lawson says the backlash from his 2024 Mexico City Grand Prix clash with Sergio Perez was so extreme that it drove him off social media early in his Formula 1 career.

Speaking on the High Performance podcast, Lawson described the abuse that followed the incident at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez as unlike anything he had experienced. In only his second F1 race, he returned to the garage to find his phone “blowing up” because he had not yet muted his Instagram notifications.

“My phone... I've never seen anything like it,” Lawson said on the podcast. “The messages, the comments on posts, the craziest stuff you could imagine people saying.” He added that even now, if he went back through his message requests, “you can't even imagine some of the things people are saying.”

The reaction followed a heated battle with Perez, the home favorite in Mexico. Lawson acknowledged that he showed Perez his middle finger after the on-track incident and said immediately afterward that it was something he should not have done. But he said the flood of abuse from Perez fans had already taken over his social media.

Lawson said the episode became one of the big early lessons of his time in F1. He described Mexico as one of several moments in his short career that felt huge at the time, but that he later came to view differently.

“I think Mexico was one of those moments,” Lawson said. Rather than breaking him, he framed it as a formative experience that changed how he handled life around the sport.

The most immediate consequence was that he deleted all of his social media apps. Lawson said he only returned to some platforms in 2025 so he could keep up with what his friends were doing, underlining how sharply the Mexico fallout altered his relationship with the online side of Formula 1.