Liam Lawson’s Miami return ended with smoke, sparks and a flipped Alpine on the inside of Turn 17, after a sudden gearbox failure left the Hastings-born driver with no gears and no way of slowing his Racing Bulls into the last hairpin. The contact with Pierre Gasly tipped the Frenchman’s car over, sent both drivers into the barriers, and ruled both men out of a race won emphatically by Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli.
It was always going to be a long weekend. Lawson had qualified twelfth and finished fifteenth in Saturday’s sprint race, and had spent practice and qualifying chasing balance the team could not quite find. When the race began he was already on the back foot, defending more than attacking and bracing for a long Sunday in traffic. Then the gearbox went.
“It sucks for both of us obviously,” Lawson told the post-race media pen, in comments published by Formula 1. “I just went into the last corner and when I braked, I lost the gearbox and went into neutral. I basically had no gears and I couldn’t stop. It’s not something I’ve had before.”
Gasly, attempting to slip past on the inside line into the hairpin, had no warning. Lawson’s Racing Bulls clipped the right rear of the Alpine and lifted it through a full rotation, leaving the French car briefly upside down before it bounced back onto its wheels at rest. Both drivers climbed out unhurt. Race control deployed a virtual safety car as marshals cleared the wreckage from the run-off area.
Over team radio in the seconds before impact, Lawson had tried to tell his engineers something was failing. “It’s destroying something, I can hear it. It’s really bad in the gearbox,” he told the Racing Bulls pit wall, a transmission picked up by RNZ. By the time he reached Turn 17 the gearbox had selected neutral and the brakes alone were not enough to scrub off the speed he was carrying.
The stewards investigated the collision and quickly ruled it a mechanical failure rather than a driving error. There was no penalty for Lawson and no implications for the next round. As RacingNews365 reported, brief on-screen graphics during the race had wrongly suggested a disqualification for Lawson, an error the broadcasters corrected within minutes.
Gasly accepted the verdict but not the result. “It shouldn’t have happened but I’m more disappointed not to get the points for the team on a weekend where we clearly deserved some,” he said. “It wasn’t pleasant inside the car and I think it could have been avoided, so it’s just a bit annoying.” Alpine had genuine pace through the weekend and had arrived in Florida hoping for their first double points finish of the season.
For Lawson the personal sting is sharper. This is now two consecutive years he has failed to finish at Miami, having exited on the opening lap of last year’s race in the same hairpin sequence. He sits tenth in the drivers’ championship with ten points, one place and six points behind the man whose race he ended on Sunday. Racing Bulls have struggled to extract the upgrades they brought to Florida, and the team’s competitive window between McLaren, Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull at the front and a recovering Williams behind has been narrowing rather than opening up.
The race itself rewarded the new pace-setter of the season. Antonelli, the eighteen-year-old Mercedes driver who replaced Lewis Hamilton over the winter, took his third consecutive grand prix victory after a tense early scrap with Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc. Verstappen spun out of the lead group, eventually finishing fifth with a five-second penalty for crossing the pit-exit line. Behind Antonelli, Lando Norris brought his McLaren home in second and Oscar Piastri completed the podium. The full top ten and a recap of the race’s many lead changes are at Formula1.com.
Lawson has three weeks until the next round at Imola for the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix. The Racing Bulls camp will need to understand exactly why the gearbox failed under braking, both because the same fault would be punishing again and because each driver is allowed only a limited number of gearbox components per season under the F1 sporting regulations. Replacing the unit earlier than scheduled would invite a grid penalty later in the year, the sort of cascading consequence a midfield team can ill afford.
There were two small consolations in Miami for the New Zealand fans who set their alarms for the early hours of Monday morning. The first is that Lawson walked away unhurt from a contact that could easily have been worse for either driver. The second is that the stewards saw the incident clearly and the Racing Bulls engineers now know exactly what failed and roughly when. The Hastings driver has shown enough at China and Japan this season to suggest the points will come back. The Miami strip just is not the place where they tend to show up.
How do you rate Lawson’s season so far, and is Imola the round where the upgraded Racing Bulls finally clicks into place? Drop your thoughts 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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