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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.”
