News Summary
- Liam Lawson says the uncertainty over his 2027 F1 seat has made some of his strongest results harder to enjoy.
- He recovered from a pit-lane start to finish seventh in Mexico City and arrives at Interlagos ninth in the drivers’ championship with 83 points.
- Racing Bulls has yet to confirm its line-up, with Lawson, Arvid Lindblad and Red Bull junior Nikola Tsolov in contention for two seats.
Liam Lawson took the chequered flag in Mexico City having climbed from the pit lane to ninth on the road. Post-race penalties moved him up to seventh, giving Racing Bulls six points on a weekend that had threatened to leave him with none. It was the kind of result he wanted to enjoy. Four days later at Interlagos, Lawson explained why his uncertain future at Racing Bulls had made that harder than it should have been.
“It is hard because you want to enjoy the good results as much as possible, and for us, we had a great race; it was a very hard weekend, but we had a great qualifying, and then we had the [disqualification],” Lawson told reporters at the São Paulo Grand Prix.
“When we have a race like that, [not knowing about my future] takes away from some of the emotion when it is so undecided about my future.
“With that in the back of your mind, it definitely takes away from some of the results we’ve had recently.”
Asked when he expected a decision, Lawson said, “It is pretty blurry at the moment, so there is not much indication on when [the decision will be announced].”
That lack of a timetable matters because most of the 2027 grid is already committed. If Racing Bulls decides to replace him, Lawson will be looking for another race seat at a point when few are available. For now, he heads into the final four scheduled rounds without knowing whether his best season in F1 will earn him another one.
Why Mexico was still on Lawson’s mind after the race
Lawson’s troubles in Mexico started in second practice, when he made contact with Max Verstappen. Both drivers received one-place grid penalties, and Lawson went to see his former Red Bull teammate the following morning to apologise. He then qualified eighth, ahead of Lindblad, before the stewards disqualified him over an infringement involving the car’s MGU-K power deployment. Changes under parc fermé meant he had to start from the pit lane.
Lawson recovered to ninth on the road and moved up two places after penalties for Oscar Piastri and Franco Colapinto. The revised Mexico City Grand Prix classification made it his third seventh-place finish in four rounds. By Thursday, he could separate the satisfaction of the drive from the frustration that had built up over the weekend.
“Mexico was just a specific weekend of being hard,” Lawson said.
“Today, I feel alright, and coming into this weekend, I feel optimistic about racing here. It is a track I like racing at, so I think Mexico was just a specific thing.
“Every day was just a hard day, with everything that was happening, and even though the race was great, I probably hadn’t got over the things that had happened over that weekend.”
Lawson’s results have put Racing Bulls in a position to defend
Mexico continued a run in which Lawson also finished seventh in Bahrain and Singapore and ninth in Austin. His best Grand Prix finish of the year remains fifth in Monaco, and he took sixth at Silverstone before Red Bull called him back to cover for the injured Isack Hadjar.
That second spell alongside Verstappen gave Lawson another chance after his scoreless two-race stint at the senior team in 2025. He scored 14 points across three Grands Prix, including seventh at Zandvoort and sixth in Madrid. When Hadjar returned, Lawson resumed his season with Racing Bulls and scored in four of his next five rounds.
Lawson is ninth in the drivers’ championship with 83 points, 69 of them scored for Racing Bulls. Lindblad has 38, and the team is fifth in the constructors’ standings with 108, 39 ahead of Alpine. Fifth would be its best finish in the constructors’ championship, including its years as Minardi. The task Lawson sees in front of him at Interlagos is to keep that gap intact.
“I feel like there’s not really much else I can do at the moment in this car. We’re having a great season, I’m personally having a great season, and we’re in a position that we’ve never been in before.
“But it’s nowhere near over, so we’re trying to maintain the gap [to Alpine] and at the moment, outside of Mexico, I feel like a lot of the races recently have been really enjoyable and some of the most enjoyable races I’ve had in a Formula 1 car.”
Why Racing Bulls still has a decision to make
Team principal Alan Permane has identified Lawson, Lindblad and Tsolov as the three candidates for two race seats. Retaining Lawson and Lindblad would keep the pairing that has taken Racing Bulls to fifth. Promoting Tsolov would give Red Bull’s junior programme a place on the grid for a driver still in contention for the Formula 2 title in his rookie season.
Tsolov trails F2 leader Rafael Câmara by seven points. He completed a private test at Imola before making his official F1 practice debut in Mexico City, where he finished FP1 in 12th, 0.126 seconds behind Lindblad. It was one session, but it gave Racing Bulls a chance to see how Tsolov worked with the team over a Grand Prix weekend. The team has yet to confirm either of its drivers for next year.
“I don’t know what else they want me to do,” Lawson said at Interlagos, as quoted by Formula 1’s official website.
GRANDE PRÊMIO is following every session of the São Paulo Grand Prix live from Interlagos in Formula 1.
