Lawson opens up on progress fueling standout F1 campaign

Liam Lawson believes his impressive 2026 campaign is the product of both personal growth and a Racing Bulls team that has found its rhythm, with the Kiwi enjoying the strongest form of his Formula 1 career.

Lawson has emerged as one of the standout performers in the midfield, scoring points in all but three races and climbing to ninth in the championship after finishing eighth in Hungary.

Racing Bulls’ rise to fifth in the constructors’ standings has mirrored his own progress.

“Naturally, the more experience you have, it’s going to be like that. Obviously the results have been better this year and so that’s going to make you feel in a good place,” Lawson told F1.com.

“It’s development we’re doing behind the scenes. It’s obviously on a personal level, having more experience, understanding that a race is long and not won in the first corner.

“I think there are a lot of things that contribute to that.”

From uncertainty to momentum

The season did not begin with such confidence. Like many teams adapting to Formula 1’s new regulations, Racing Bulls initially struggled to understand its VCARB 03.

“The car was difficult at the start of the year so I definitely wasn’t confident about how the year would go, but just very focused on trying to make sure I had a good understanding of the new regulations and how to extract everything out of them,” Lawson admitted.

“And then we very quickly found a lot of performance out of the car, and that’s been really working.”

That turnaround became clear as early as China, where Lawson scored his first points of the year. Since then, Racing Bulls has become a regular points contender, including a remarkable four-race double-points streak from Monaco to Britain.

“I think it was probably more of a surprise in the initial findings and when we started really finding performance out of the car, but since then, honestly, it’s not really a surprise,” he said.

“It’s not an expectation but it’s something that we know we can achieve – we’ve done it many times this year, and we want to keep repeating that.”

Learning from every weekend

Lawson has twice matched his career-best finish of sixth, in Monaco and at Silverstone, and he feels those strong weekends shared a common theme.

“We had some really good races – Monaco was very, very strong, Austria was great, Silverstone was great, but they were all honestly quite similar in the way that we built up through the weekend, and I really feel like we extracted everything out of the car each time,” he said.

“And then we had very clean races, so the standout ones are probably the ones that didn’t go so well, which is more of a good thing to have less of those, like we’ve had.

“But they’re the ones that obviously we need to learn the most from.”

Hungary offered another example of that resilience, with Lawson bouncing back from a difficult Belgian weekend to score points again.

He also believes teammate Arvid Lindblad has helped Racing Bulls maintain a clear technical direction.

“Yeah, honestly I think the team’s in a very, very good place,” Lawson said.

“Arvid’s obviously very quick and it’s quite similar [between us], probably a similar feeling in the car that I have.

“That’s probably helped as well, helped the team in the direction we’ve been going, so I think that’s been very, very strong.”

• Read also: How family history led Lindblad to reject Monaco residency

Despite now being the highest-placed driver outside Formula 1’s leading four teams, Lawson insists his target remains simple.

“There’s no specific place that I’m trying to finish or something like that,” he said. “It’s very hard to have that kind of expectation in Formula 1, especially when you’re in the midfield.

“But if we can be the best midfield team, then I think we would have done our job as drivers as well.”

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