Liam Lawson cites Kimi Antonelli’s treatment by Mercedes in presenting his RB axing

Liam Lawson has recently reflected on his axing from the Red Bull Racing outfit after two races of the 2025 season. The New Zealand driver drew a comparison with Mercedes’ treatment of Kimi Antonelli in a recent interview.

Lawson, who was promoted from the Racing Bulls outfit as a replacement for Sergio Perez, detailed how the team’s approach, considering he was a young driver, played a part in the results he recorded at the Milton Keynes-based team. Speaking in an interview with RacingNews365, the 23-year-old also touched on his first two races being at circuits he has never raced at. He said:

"If you look at how other teams have approached bringing a young driver in and you look at the test days, the time in the seat, the amount of testing that, for example, Kimi [Antonelli], has done in the past before racing this year - we didn't do any of that.”

"It was two weekends on two tracks I'd never raced at, one of them being a sprint weekend. They weren't smooth weekends. We had issues in Bahrain [testing] with reliability, we had issues in Melbourne with reliability," Lawson added.

Liam Lawson’s stint at the Red Bull Racing team indeed shaped out in a manner many had envisioned. The Kiwi native suffered a DNF in his maiden race with the team at the Australian Grand Prix and failed to record any point-scoring finish during the Sprint and Grand Prix in the next event in China.

Liam Lawson highlighted his “main target” for 2025 season

Liam Lawson highlighted his main target for the remainder of the 2025 season before entering the Hungarian Grand Prix earlier this month. The Kiwi driver, who is in his first full season in Formula 1, has endured a challenging campaign so far.

The Racing Bulls driver detailed how his focus would be on improving his qualifying. Lawson highlighted how an impressive qualifying could largely translate into better race results for him in the final 10 Grand Prix of the season.

Speaking during the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend, as captured by F1.com, he stated:

“Qualifying is very important, it sets up your weekend. Where our weekends have fallen away, at least on my side, has been normally in an average Qualifying. Where our weekends have been strong, it's when we qualify well.”

“That's the main target: just extracting everything, making sure we have the car in the best place going into Qualifying, and then for me getting everything out of it and doing a better job,” he added.

Liam Lawson has largely endured a rocky 2025 campaign so far. The Kiwi driver started the campaign as a teammate to Max Verstappen. However, following just two races into the season, he was demoted to the Racing Bulls outfit and replaced by Yuki Tsunoda.

His return to the Racing Bulls team has, however, proven to be far from smooth as he would have envisioned, as not until the Grand Prix in Monaco that he was able to record his first points for the Faenza-based outfit. However, recently the former Red Bull driver has shown improvement with three top ten finishes in the last four races.