For a driver who spent most of last year fighting his machinery, his luck and his own paddock, Liam Lawson is finally having the kind of Formula 1 season New Zealand motorsport fans have been waiting for. Seven rounds into the 2026 campaign, the 24 year old from Hastings has quietly put together the most consistent stretch of his career, and the numbers are starting to back up the feeling.
Lawson sits tenth in the drivers’ championship with 28 points, a tally that already lands within ten points of everything he managed across the whole of last year. He has scored in five of the last six races and banked five top ten finishes, and he has reached the first part of qualifying at every single grand prix while breaking into the top ten shootout twice. After a 2025 season defined by a brutal early demotion and a run of rotten luck, that sort of reliability is the real story, as RNZ reported this week.
The most recent proof came in Spain. At the Barcelona-Catalunya circuit Lawson crossed the line ninth, then was promoted to eighth after a post race penalty handed to Franco Colapinto, banking another four points for his Racing Bulls team. It was not a spectacular result, but it was exactly the sort of steady points haul that has come to define his year.
“We’ve managed to score points in most races, which is a testament to the hard work everyone is putting in,” Lawson said after the race.
Two weeks earlier in Monaco he produced the standout drive of his season so far. Starting tenth on the streets of Monte Carlo, Lawson climbed to fifth to equal his best ever finish in the sport, surviving a chaotic race that featured two safety cars, a late red flag and seven retirements. The result was all the more remarkable given how his weekend nearly fell apart before it began, with both Racing Bulls cars still being assembled in the pit lane as the start approached.
“I didn’t think I was going to race, I turned up to the garage and we had issues and I saw the car in pieces and so to put it together and just go and have a car that was very competitive was great,” Lawson told reporters in Monaco.
“For us it’s a good result, it feels really good especially where we started the weekend and obviously where we started the race as well.”
His rookie teammate, British teenager Arvid Lindblad, finished sixth in Monaco after starting fifteenth, giving Racing Bulls a rare double points day and underlining that the team has a genuinely competitive car this season. The squad sits sixth in the constructors’ championship, in a tight midfield scrap with Alpine.
The turnaround matters because of where Lawson was twelve months ago. He began the 2025 season promoted to the senior Red Bull team, only to be dropped back to the junior outfit after just two rounds and replaced by Yuki Tsunoda. What followed was a year of bad luck, first lap incidents and missed opportunities that made it hard to judge what he could actually do with a clear run. In 2026 he has finally had that clear run, and he is making it count.
Team principal Alan Permane has been blunt about what the change comes down to. “What he needs to do, and what he is doing so far, is eliminate mistakes. It’s working on the consistency,” Permane said.
That word, consistency, is the thread running through Lawson’s season. The flashy single results matter, but the more telling story is a driver who keeps qualifying solidly, keeps avoiding the costly errors and keeps dragging the car into the points when the opportunity is there. In a sport where reputations are built and broken on reliability as much as raw speed, it is the kind of season that quietly rebuilds a career.
There is room to push higher. Lawson has yet to crack the top five qualifying group with any regularity, and the midfield in 2026 is brutally tight, with small mistakes in qualifying turning a points finish into a frustrating afternoon stuck in traffic. But the foundation is now clearly there, and a driver who looked under pressure for his seat a year ago suddenly looks like one of the more dependable performers in the lower half of the grid.
Next up is a race that carries some history for him. The Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring runs on 29 June, the same circuit where Lawson scored a breakthrough sixth place in 2025. A repeat, or better, would cap one of the strongest runs of his time in the sport and tighten his grip on a midfield seat he has worked hard to hold.
For now, Lawson is doing the unglamorous work that lasts. Show up, qualify well, stay out of trouble and bring the car home. It is not the stuff of highlight reels, but it is exactly what a young New Zealand driver needs to do to turn a precarious foothold into a real Formula 1 career.
What do you make of Liam Lawson’s season so far? Is he doing enough to lock in his seat for the long haul? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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