Do we like Liam Lawson?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Clean on harm and decent off track, but the record is thin on speaking up for others, so it stops short of the top bracket.
Liam Lawson is the Kiwi in the Racing Bulls car, and his career has had a few wild turns. Red Bull promoted him to its senior team in 2025, then dropped him after just two races. He has called that demotion devastating, and said he was very unprepared for the step up.
The comeback is the better story. After the demotion he fought back in the midfield, and by late June 2026 he had finished three races in a row in the points and sat 10th in the standings. By early October he was ninth, which is a decent effort for a bloke who was written off a year earlier.
The stoushes are mostly on-track rivalry. In Mexico in 2024 he made an offensive gesture at Sergio Perez, and the two renewed their feud at the 2026 Australian Grand Prix. Lawson was heard on the radio saying “that guy f***ing sucks”, and the stewards cleared Perez of any penalty. Perez later called it “a bit of fun racing”, so it reads as two rivals who can't stand each other rather than anything nasty.
In October 2025 Mexico's motorsport federation blamed Lawson for a near-miss with marshals. The FIA said its telemetry showed he slowed appropriately and was not at fault. For a driver with a reputation as a lightning rod, that's a good example of the blame landing in the wrong place.
On the harm test, we found nothing. No searches turned up anything from him about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate, and no record of him pushing conspiracy theories or keeping dodgy company. That's a clean sheet, but also a quiet one: he mostly keeps to racing, so we can't say he has used his platform for anyone else.
He says he has been on the receiving end of online abuse, particularly after Mexico in 2024. He told a podcast it was “not healthy” to read, and he has since muted F1 accounts on social media. He also said drivers should be backed for their own sake rather than by tearing down rivals, which is a decent line to take.