Racing
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Liam Lawson says Max Verstappen was one of his strongest supporters after Red Bull dropped him from its senior Formula 1 team just two race weekends into 2025.
Speaking on the High Performance podcast, Lawson said Verstappen backed him through the fallout of a brief Red Bull stint that ended after the Australian and Chinese Grands Prix. Lawson had been promoted from Racing Bulls to replace Sergio Perez before the season, but Red Bull then moved him back out of the seat and replaced him with Yuki Tsunoda.
Lawson said Verstappen’s support was not limited to private sympathy after the decision, adding that the four-time world champion had also signaled his own discontent with the move at the time.
"When I went to Red Bull through all of it, he was very supportive. I won't go too much into detail about it, but he was very supportive, very, very supportive," Lawson said.
He said that mattered because Verstappen’s approach to him had been consistent long before they became team-mates. Lawson recalled that when he was Red Bull’s reserve driver and racing in Formula 2, Verstappen would make a point of speaking to him in the paddock and asking about his campaign.
"When I came in, I noticed he would always make an effort to, like, just acknowledge me and say hi and stuff like this, and when I first was a reserve, he knew I was racing F2 and said he'd come and ask me about it, 'How's F2 going? How's the car? What do you know? How's everything feeling?'" Lawson said.
Lawson said he spoke to several people while the situation was unfolding, including Verstappen directly, and that he appreciated the support even more because of what the promotion had represented to him. Sharing a team with Verstappen had given him the chance to study the benchmark of the field in effectively the same car.
He said that opportunity felt like "driving lessons from the best driver in motorsport," a perspective that underlined what Red Bull’s abrupt change had cost him as well as why Verstappen’s backing carried such weight.