How One Overtake Earned Liam Lawson a Red Bull Contract and More Facts About Him You Didn’t Know

One overtake changed his life

First impressions can make or break your career. This is a concept that Lawson is all too familiar with, because he himself lived it. 

“My story is crazy,” he told the Pitstop podcast hosts Jake Boys and Fabio Bocca in 2024. “The way that everything worked out for me from when I was young is… I’m extremely lucky.”

Lawson has been racing since 2015, but his big moment didn't come until 2019. It was a precarious time in his racing career, having finished the previous year with no long-term contracts going forward. As a hail mary, Lawson entered the 2019 Toyota Racing Series, a five-week series held in the New Zealand summer (in other words, January), running cars similar to Formula 3.

He raced in the series for M2 Competition, alongside several other drivers including Lucas Auer, a Red Bull junior driver at the time. With Auer competing, the Head of the Red Bull Junior Team, Helmut Marko, was naturally in attendance, and happened to see an on-track moment from Lawson that sealed the deal.

“I went into this championship like, ‘I’ve got to somehow pull something out of this’,” recalled Lawson, “and after the first weekend we had the contract from Red Bull. 

“It was from an overtake. It literally was one big overtake I did on somebody, and the next day we had the contract.”

Lawson became an official Red Bull Junior Driver by February of 2019, setting himself down the path to his current F1 seat. 

Oh, and as for the Toyota Racing Series he competed in? He won that too.

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Drinks tube in his nose

Lawson’s debut in F1 at the 2023 Dutch Grand Prix was filled with many new experiences, including the F1 drinks system. While Lawson had participated in a few FP1 sessions the year before, these are much shorter than a full length grand prix, so he never had the chance to try drinking from the integrated system.

“The first time I tried to use it was Zandvoort, and I had an absolute nightmare,” said Lawson on Beyond the Grid in 2023. “Basically when I went to use the tube, I tried to grab it with my mouth and I flicked it up, and it got stuck in my nose.”

The weekend had already been quite the exciting one, as he recalled, “We’re like five laps into the race, I’m learning this car on slick tyres, I’d never driven all weekend on slicks, it was the start of a grand prix so there’s obviously a lot going on, and I thought ‘I wasn’t even thirsty, I don’t even know why I did it.’”

Alas, the drinks tube was a persistent curve ball that Lawson had to endure a bit longer than expected.

“Three laps go by, four laps go by, and I’m stressing now because I’m thinking, ‘am I gonna have to do the whole race with this drinks tube stuck in my nose?’

“Thankfully a Safety Car came out quite early on and I could reach up and basically grab it, and I didn’t touch it for the rest of the race. That was my first experience with it so I've always struggled using it in the race.”

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Winning on debut was almost a given

By definition, a debut race in a given series is something that happens once in a lifetime for a driver. So to win on debut is even more of a unique feat. 

Yet for Lawson, winning on debut happened so often in his early career that it became something he became known for. Making his first appearance in a racing series back in 2015, in the Formula First Manfeild Winter Series, Lawson immediately kicked things off with a win in the first single-seater race of his entire career. He then went on to take victory in his debut race in New Zealand’s 2016 F1600 Championship Series, where he dominated the field, winning 14 of the total 15 races held to clinch his first ever title.

Lawson followed this up with several more debut wins. Two particularly notable ones were the 2019 Toyota Racing Series (yes, the same race with the infamous overtake that got him a Red Bull Junior Team contract from Helmut Marko), and his Formula 2 debut in Bahrain during the 2021 season, when he took the win during Sprint Race 1. 

The immense amount of times that Lawson has won his first race in a series shows his adaptability, and his versatility as a driver. That same adaptability also helped him navigate the ever-changing landscape of his career between 2023 and 2024, smoothly transitioning into F1 as a reserve driver twice, and also from Racing Bulls (previously VCARB) to Red Bull and swiftly back to VCARB in 2025. And while his F1 debut did not come with a win, surely we will see him add to his unique tally of first-race wins in other series down the line.

Want more surprising facts about this year’s F1 drivers and race tracks? Sign up for our newsletter for a bonus fact about Liam Lawson, and be sure to check out our other Speed Reads:

• Hungarian GP Facts You Didn't Know
• Belgian GP Facts You Didn't Know 

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Images via Red Bull Content Pool