Liam Lawson makes heartbreaking admission about the personal 'cost' of brutal Red Bull demotion

Liam Lawson has admitted that driving in Formula One has come at a great personal cost in a candid discussion about his brutal Red Bull demotion.

It's no secret that Formula One can be a truly ruthless and brutal sport to compete in, with drivers seeing their hopes of making it into one of the 22 available seats realised and shattered within just weeks or months.

Although the 2026 season is yet to see a driver lose their seat, the rumour mill is already up and running with several drivers linked with exits as the summer break rapidly approaches.

However, when considering the brutal nature of the sport there is one man who knows just how tough it can be perhaps more than anybody else on the grid, Lawson.

After securing a surprise promotion to replace Sergio Perez at Red Bull ahead of the 2025 season, Lawson saw his dreams of driving for one of the top teams snatched away when we was demoted after just two races.

The New Zealander moved back to junior team Racing Bulls, where he currently has a seat, with replacement Yuki Tsunoda later losing his seat at Red Bull, and spot on the grid, at the end of the season.

During an appearance on the High Performance Podcast, Lawson opened up about his F1 journey and ended up revealing a candid amount the personal cost competing on the sport has had on his mental health.

When asked what exactly F1 had cost him, he tragically admitted: “It sounds quite sad, but it’s probably just happiness.

“I think people probably think you’re a lot happier because of the position I’m in – and don’t get me wrong, I understand how lucky I am to be here, but because of that thing that we’re so focused and driven towards, I feel like I’m not happy until I do it or until I achieve it.

“So for me, it’s probably just overall happiness. I have happy moments for sure. It’s not that I’m not happy all the time, but it’s overall in life, at the moment.”

Liam Lawson addresses brutal Red Bull demotion

Of course, a large part of why Lawson may not feel as happy in Formula One than many would expect will of course have been due to the ruthless nature of his demotion from Red Bull.

In December 2024, he learned that, against the odds, he would be given the chance to take the step up to Red Bull and prove himself and yet three months later, he was back driving for Racing Bulls.

When asked about his experience of the whole ordeal, Lawson shockingly revealed that, despite rumours of his exit circulating before it was announced, he had no idea that it was actually going to happen.

“I remember thinking there was earlier a couple of rumours around that weekend,” he said.

“At the start there started to be a rumour about the Japanese Grand Prix coming up, Yuki [Tsunoda] is Japanese, do they do that?

“And I honestly remember trusting my team so much and I was like, that’s insane that they’re even saying that. Classic F1 rumours.

“And then I went back and I couldn’t believe it.”

Lawson added that the decision was such a surprise to him after the team had tried quite a radical new set up during his final Red Bull race in China.

“I was like, ‘What?’ If you told me before the race, ‘Okay we’re going to run this crazy car for your last race in a Red Bull, or we’re going to run the setup that you’ve run a weekend’. What do you think I would have said?

“That, at the time, was like a really hard thing to deal with.”

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Naturally, Lawson received huge public backlash following his Red Bull sacking, something he admitted made the situation even harder, but thankfully the support of his fellow drivers, particularly Max Verstappen, helped get him through it.

“There was at the time so much noise around,” he said.

“How much people think I sucked, and why I shouldn’t be in Formula 1, and all these kinds of things.

“The whole thing was played out to be me being mentally struggling, and all this stuff, and like they were doing it to protect me, and that honestly just could not be further from what it was actually like.

"I spoke to a lot of people during that time, but I spoke to him (Verstappen) about it. He was very supportive,"