Speaking on the High Performance Podcast with Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes, the Kiwi gave a candid account of the personal toll of life in F1 in a wide-ranging conversation about his career and motorsport journey.
Asked what F1 had cost him personally, Lawson was candid about the toll of the sport.
“It sounds quite sad, but it’s probably just happiness,” he admitted.
“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.”
The 24-year-old also opened up on his sudden exit from Red Bull after just two races last year, with the New Zealander moved back to Racing Bulls following difficult weekends in Australia and China.
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Lawson said he had no warning he was about to be moved out of Red Bull, despite rumours beginning to circulate around the Chinese Grand Prix weekend.
Asked if any part of him expected the decision, Lawson said he had absolutely no idea.
“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 said the circumstances around his final race for Red Bull made the decision even harder to process.
He explained that Red Bull had elected to make a radical set-up change for the Chinese Grand Prix, with the aim of finding a direction that could help both him and the team after the difficult season opener in Australia.
“We’d spoken about basically trying something quite wild on the car to get some comfort for me, but also because the team at the time collectively we weren’t happy at all with the car,” Lawson explained.
“Max [Verstappen] wasn’t happy. Everyone was like, this is not working and we need to try something quite radical here.
“And so we all kind of had a meeting on Saturday night and it was decided I was on board with it, because the idea was let’s try something quite crazy but it might help get a direction for Liam and for the team going forward to make this car a bit easier to drive.
“So we decided, okay, let’s start from the pit lane and basically radically change the car. We made a massive change you would never do on a race weekend.
“So I ran it. It sucked for this race. The car was so, so hard to drive and basically destroyed our race. But honestly, I didn’t care at the time, because I was like, there’s a reason we’ve done this.”
Lawson said he then returned to the United Kingdom expecting to complete simulator work before receiving the call that he was being replaced.
“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.”
Lawson said he did not have time to properly process the decision ahead of the next race in Japan.
He added the public reaction made the period harder, particularly as criticism grew around whether he deserved to remain in F1.
“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.”
Lawson accepted he could have performed better but maintained two race weekends was not enough to properly judge him.
He said his preparation had been limited, while China was a sprint weekend at a circuit he had never raced at.
Lawson said he tried to focus on the fact he still had an F1 seat and an opportunity to rebuild, rather than the loss of what he described as his dream drive.
He also reaffirmed Max Verstappen was privately supportive during the fallout from his Red Bull exit.
“I spoke to a lot of people during that time, but I spoke to him about it. He was very supportive,” Lawson said.
Lawson said the experience had changed him as a driver and made him more resilient, while also helping him become a “smarter” driver this season.
“There are situations where there’s being a smart driver, and I feel like this year I’m trying to do more of that as well,” he said.
“But also keeping that you can’t let people walk all over you.”
The interview also turned emotional when Lawson spoke about the sacrifices made by his family during his junior career.
He said his parents had found a card written by his younger brother when they were children, asking their father whether he would spend more time with him if he also liked racing.
“Dear dad, if I like racing, will you spend more time with me? Like Liam,” Lawson recalled the card saying.
Lawson said the discovery underlined the scale of what his family had given up to help him reach F1.
“I feel like I’ll never be able to almost repay the amount of sacrifice that, and it’s not just about just money,” he said.
“Like for my siblings and family that have just given up so much. Like time with my dad and never going on holiday. Never doing anything.”
He said that ultimately, through all the hardships of getting to the top, he was grateful for the support and wanted to use his time in the sport to encourage young racers from parts of the world such as New Zealand and Australia to believe it was possible to achieve their goals.
“It’s what my parents and my dad told me when I was young, if you genuinely believe in something, if you want to do this and you believe in it and you work hard enough, it doesn’t matter what anybody says, you can do it,” he said.
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