Liam Lawson's Last Chance at Red Bull in Madrid

Liam Lawson has only six points to show for his latest Formula One cameo. They might be the most important six of his career.

The 24-year-old New Zealander has always insisted he could have grown into a long-term Red Bull driver if the organisation had simply given him time. His form at Racing Bulls this season has backed that belief, turning him from a forgotten understudy into a serious option again.

Now, with Isack Hadjar still sidelined, Lawson gets what is expected to be his final outing as an injury replacement as Formula One rolls into Madrid for the city’s first Grand Prix. One more weekend. One more chance to remind the people who let him go what they might have lost.

By the time the lights go out in the Spanish capital, Lawson’s tally of Red Bull starts will rise to three, nudging past the two he managed in 2025. The numbers are modest. The context is not.

A very different Red Bull

Lawson returns to a team that barely resembles the one that promoted and then dropped him with brutal speed last year. The powerbrokers most closely associated with that rollercoaster – Christian Horner and Dr Helmut Marko – have both departed, leaving a reshaped hierarchy and, potentially, a cleaner slate.

The old wounds? He insists they’ve healed.

“It’s not something I really think too much about,” Lawson said. “It was a very long time ago, it was very early in my Formula One career.

“We had a strong second half of last season, and this year has been very positive. People are going to judge it however they want to.

“But at the end of the day, in whatever car I’m driving, I’m going to get the most out of it. The last two weekends, we’ve done that.”

There’s no lingering bitterness in that message, at least not publicly. Just a quiet statement of intent from a driver who knows his future beyond this season is still unresolved – and that every lap now doubles as an audition.

A new city, a new street, no margin

Madrid will not offer him any comfort zone.

The Spanish Grand Prix has long been synonymous with Barcelona, a permanent fixture on the calendar and a circuit every driver could lap in their sleep. Shifting the race more than 500 kilometres to the capital tears up that familiarity and drops the grid into a brand new street circuit.

The ‘Madring’ has been billed as a high-speed, high-risk arena, a cousin to Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah Corniche Circuit. Fast sweeps, tight walls, and precious little room for error. It is exactly the sort of place where confidence and commitment separate contenders from survivors.

For Lawson, that means compressing a year’s worth of learning into three practice sessions.

“The very first lap is building everything up, it’s building everything up,” he explained. “It’s just [about] learning the track.

“It’s almost like you’re in Monaco at the start of a weekend, and making sure you do all the laps. You want to have as much time on track as possible.

“When we go to tracks like Monza and other places, we’ve been there plenty of times, they’re simple tracks. You can spend a bit more time long running or [finding] set-up changes.

“Here, it’s about doing the laps and making sure that by qualifying, you’ve prepared as much as you can.”

No secret tricks. No shortcuts. Just mileage, rhythm, and survival until the grip and the confidence arrive.

One more weekend to convince

Lawson’s situation is stark. Hadjar will return. Red Bull’s longer-term driver plans remain deliberately opaque. The New Zealander cannot control any of that.

What he can control is Madrid.

Another clean, points-scoring performance in a car he is still re-acclimatising to would not erase the chaos of his first Red Bull stint, but it would strengthen his argument that those days belong to a different version of the team – and a far younger version of himself.

The Spanish Grand Prix weekend opens with the first of three practice sessions at 11.30pm on Friday (NZT). For most, it’s the start of a new race in a new city.

For Lawson, it might feel more like the start of a final exam.