Eighteen months on from a calamitous two-race stint with Red Bull in Formula 1, Liam Lawson came full circle by delivering on the promise he always said he would.
With Verstappen's regular team-mate Hadjar sidelined by a wrist injury, Lawson was recalled from satellite team Racing Bulls to step into the Frenchman's RB22 for the Zandvoort weekend.
For Red Bull, it was the most logical choice given Lawson's extensive F1 experience compared to rookie team-mate Arvid Lindblad, and his knowledge of the 2026 cars compared to reserve driver Yuki Tsunoda, who slotted in at Racing Bulls instead.
For Lawson, it felt like there was a lot more at stake. As he continues to stake his claim for a long-term F1 future, Zandvoort was an unexpected opportunity to right the wrongs of his first Red Bull stint, which lasted all of two races at the start of 2025 before being unceremoniously swapped with Tsunoda by then team boss Christian Horner and driver advisor Helmut Marko.
Like series returnee Tsunoda at the sister team, Lawson treated Zandvoort's sprint sessions as if they were part of a regular weekend to build himself up for grand prix qualifying on Saturday afternoon.
Having advanced to the top 10 shoot-out without too much trouble, Lawson's Q3 lap of 1m11.733s yielded eighth on the grid. That lap was 0.570s off pole but, crucially, only a tenth behind team-mate Verstappen as Red Bull struggled for pace on the Dutchman's home soil. A world away from qualifying 18th on his Red Bull debut at the 2025 Australian Grand Prix and 20th the following week in China.
Liam Lawson, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images
"It's been very challenging to try and build up in a short space of time, but obviously the target was to keep improving through the weekend," Lawson said when asked by Motorsport.com how satisfying it was to stick close to Verstappen in Zandvoort. "It was a good job from everybody to help me get me as comfortable as possible in the car. I feel like I extracted pretty much everything I had out of the car.
"As drivers we all have plenty of self-belief, so without expecting too much I tried to be as prepared as possible. Knowing the speed of the car this year, I just was trying to get as close to Max as possible and try to learn from what he was doing. Today we executed well."
As tempting as it is to distil a complex sport down to a simple cause and effect, it's impossible to pin Lawson's squeaky clean Zandvoort performance - the opposite outcome of his first go in a Red Bull F1 car - to a singular factor.
The circumstances couldn't have been much more different, with Lawson on the back foot from day one at the start of last season in a difficult to drive RB21. Having never driven at either Melbourne or Shanghai before, Lawson was never able to get his feet under the table before being given his marching orders. It also never felt like Red Bull's previous management truly believed in Lawson, only that it had more faith in him than in Tsunoda.
"Last year it was obviously extremely close, because the cars were in the last year of the regulations, so they were fully developed," Lawson explained. "Overall, the car was very difficult to drive and on top of that, I'd never been to Melbourne and China. China was a sprint weekend, there's plenty of things that happened over those weekends that didn't help us and then that was it."
The 2026 generation of F1 cars has also helped, as it has become easier to get to the limit in qualifying and Red Bull's latest car is less of a knife-edge than its recalcitrant predecessor. But other than sharing the same power unit from Red Bull Ford Powertrains, Lawson found the RB22 to be a completely different car compared to the VCARB 03.
Liam Lawson, Racing Bulls
Photo by: Simon Galloway / LAT Images via Getty Images
"The best way I can describe it is that outside of the power unit every single thing feels different," he explained. "The way the steering feels versus how the car moves, balance through corners, obviously the high-speed grip, everything's different about it.
Comparing his Zandvoort machine to the 2025 Red Bull, he said: "It's throwing a car into a corner and knowing and feeling what it's going to do. Last year, the car was on such a knife edge at least at the start that if you weren't on that limit then it was a huge lap time killer and this year there are so many more factors."
It's not just the car that's of a different specification, though. That early 2025 version of Lawson also wasn't the same spec as the one facing the uphill task to change cars at the Dutch Grand Prix. With a season-and-a-half of experience under his belt, the 24-year-old felt better prepared and has become a more complete package as a driver at Racing Bulls.
"I've also learnt a lot, just personal things," the New Zealander pointed out. "I went into last year, obviously thinking I was going to have more time in the car - so I was more or less adapting to everything that Max had in the car.
"With more time obviously I feel like I would have adjusted to the car. But coming into this weekend, I've had a lot more races in Formula 1. Outside of that, it's just having a bit more experience trying to prepare this weekend."
If there's one characterisation Lawson has fought against the most, then it's that the failure of his first Red Bull foray was down to a lack of confidence, as was suggested at the time. Lawson always challenged that line and said he just needed more seat time. It felt good to back that up with some facts in Zandvoort.
"It's great," he nodded. "It's something I've always known that with different circumstances, things would have gone differently. But maybe to you guys and to the world, now you can see it as well."
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Originally published by motorsport.com —
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