Liam Lawson 'curious' to discover Racing Bulls unknown after first F1 test
Liam Lawson is "curious" to see how his Racing Bulls car performs once F1 testing moves to Bahrain after the Barcelona shakedown. Lawson posted a total of 152 laps in his day-and-a-half in the new RBPT-powered Racing Bulls machine in Spain to go with the private filming day and shakedown running the team completed at Imola. The Imola running was completed in wet conditions, whilst Barcelona was cold, with testing moving to Bahrain in the middle of February, with the Sakhir track vastly different in terms of characteristics from Barcelona. Sakhir is renowned as an aggressive track on tyres due to the heavy traction zones and abrasive track surface, with Lawson keen to discover how the field stacks up once testing gets underway in the Middle East on February 11th. "There's a lot to learn for all of us as the 2026 car is very different to drive, so I just tried to adapt as much as I could," Lawson explained. "The car has less downforce compared to the past, so it moves around quite a bit; there’s a lot of power when the battery is fully deployed, but the way in which you have to manage it is something completely new. "We’ve been trying several things on the car, and it’s been great to keep building mileage on the new power unit. We had a pretty strong test in terms of reliability, but in terms of expectations, it’s very hard to say at this point, as we don’t know where everyone else is. "I think that will stay quite unknown for a while, but we’re focused on our own job and want to keep improving in order to be in the best shape possible for the first race in Melbourne. "Overall, we ended the test in a much better place than where we started on Monday. The next test in Bahrain is in less than two weeks, so we’ll keep collecting data, but it's a completely different track from [Barcelona], so I'll be curious to see how the car performs in those conditions.”
