Liam Lawson

Liam Lawson's introduction to Formula 1 came the hard way — thrown in mid-season, with almost no warning, to replace an injured driver, and somehow making it look almost routine. Growing up in New Zealand, a country with a proud but small motorsport scene, Lawson had to travel to the other side of the world early in his career just to get noticed, working his way up through European junior formulae as part of Red Bull's junior driver programme, a pathway that's simultaneously the best and most unforgiving route into the sport.

His first taste of a Formula 1 race weekend came in 2023, stepping in for an injured Daniel Ricciardo at what was then AlphaTauri with almost no preparation time — a scenario that's broken plenty of promising careers before they've properly begun. Lawson instead delivered composed, mistake-free performances that immediately validated Red Bull's faith in him, banking enough credibility from those substitute appearances that a fuller opportunity felt like a matter of when, not if.

That fuller chance arrived in dramatic fashion: a promotion to the senior Red Bull team itself, partnering Max Verstappen, one of the most demanding seats on the grid for any driver, let alone one with limited full-season experience. It didn't go smoothly. Lawson struggled to find consistent pace against a team-mate widely regarded as the benchmark of the sport, and Red Bull — a team notorious for moving quickly and unsentimentally when a junior driver isn't delivering — swapped him back to Racing Bulls before the season was out, with Yuki Tsunoda promoted in his place.

For a lot of drivers, that kind of public demotion would be a career-defining setback. Lawson's response has been to treat it as exactly the kind of adversity Red Bull's junior programme is designed to test, going back to Racing Bulls and quietly rebuilding his results and his reputation rather than letting the disappointment define him. There's a resilience to how he's handled it that's earned him respect even from people who were sceptical about the promotion in the first place.

He remains, at this stage of his career, a driver still writing the next chapter rather than looking back on a finished story. The speed that got him fast-tracked in the first place hasn't gone anywhere; what's being tested now is whether he can turn a difficult, very public setback into the kind of comeback story the sport loves. Given how he handled the emergency call-up that started his F1 career in the first place, nobody in the paddock is ruling it out.