Liam Lawson has spoken about the cut-throat reality of the Formula 1 paddock and what makes it “very, very hard” to trust people in the championship.
The Racing Bulls driver spoke about his two-race stint at Red Bull as Max Verstappen’s team-mate at the start of 2025 and his time with the Milton Keynes outfit’s sister team during an appearance on the High Performance podcast.
As he reflected on his exit from the Austrian team, Lawson pointed to the sheer scale of modern F1 operations as a breeding ground for miscommunication.
“I don’t want to specify so much that it’s just particularly Red Bull, but it’s just how Formula 1 is,” he said. “There are so many people in a Formula 1 team. They do an amazing job to work together as a well-oiled machine, and you see, especially in the garage, you see the mechanics, everybody working. They all have such a specific role. The engineering side of Formula 1 is very, very impressive.
“But outside of that, there’s the rest of the team, the business side of Formula 1, which has an incredible amount of people that work in it. And when you have that many people working, it’s very hard. Things get lost in translation between people.
“I feel like at the time they could have done a much better job at communicating it to me,” he added of his demotion from Red Bull to Racing Bulls. “I wish they had, but stuff like this happens quite a lot where rumours spread.
Liam Lawson, Racing Bulls Team
Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images
“Nothing can really stay a secret. It’s quite crazy how there’ll be a conversation which is between two people where it starts, that’s a first conversation about an idea, and it’s insane how quickly that gets out because I’ve been in those conversations, and for me, it was about when I would be driving a car or when maybe I’d get a team change or something like this, when it was for me, not when it was against me.
“But those conversations, I was there at the start of it, and then it was straight out to the media.”
The 24-year-old explained that these situations made him struggle to trust people in F1.
“It’s very hard to truly trust people. It’s very, very hard, honestly. It’s very, very hard. We look at it like we’re the two drivers that get to drive these incredible cars, and we have these amazing teams around us that are building these cars.
“But everybody is on their own journey in the team and everybody is also looking after themselves, which is fair, because it’s their career. So when you have situations, it’s very natural for people to protect themselves first. And I think this is also what happens quite a lot in situations.
“To trust everybody is very, very tough. And so for me, it’s about having people that I know I do trust around me, mainly on a personal level, that I go to.”
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