– Liam Lawson replaced the injured Isack Hadjar at the Dutch Grand Prix over the weekend and performed significantly better than in his unsuccessful A-Team debut at the start of the 2025 season. Team principal Laurent Mekies is satisfied after the New Zealander finished the race in seventh place.
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“It is extremely difficult nowadays to switch from one team to another. That’s why I think Liam got the best out of it,” Mekies emphasized on Sky. “He did a very good job in qualifying and was only a tenth of a second behind Max [Verstappen].”
“The race was quite lonely for him. We lacked the reference of Max, which makes it hard to judge the pace,” he continued. “But he took the points, secured seventh place – and that was probably the maximum.”
Lawson finished with a significant gap behind the other six drivers from the top teams Mercedes, McLaren, and Ferrari: he was 37 seconds behind Oscar Piastri when crossing the finish line.
Additionally, he received a ten-second time penalty for not slowing down sufficiently under yellow flags, but this did not matter as Nico Hülkenberg was already a lap behind him.
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“Honestly, it was tough today,” Lawson said after the race on Sky. “The first lap was still quite fun, but after that we simply had problems with the pace to keep up with the guys at the front.”
“After yesterday, I already knew it would be a tough race. We were both behind them, and since I had a really good lap yesterday, I knew what to expect.”
“Maybe I didn’t imagine it to be quite so extreme – we really struggled to keep up with the pace of the top teams – but I’m sure I can take a lot from this. I will of course analyze the weekend afterwards,” said the regular Racing Bulls driver.
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Whether he will return to the sister team Racing Bulls for the upcoming race in Monza is currently not yet decided.
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