Ten points clear of nowhere, Liam Lawson goes into the Hungarian Grand Prix tenth in the title race on 39 points — a bigger haul than he managed in all of last season. To understand why that is a comeback rather than a footnote, rewind 18 months, to the two races he spent in a Red Bull alongside Max Verstappen before being cut loose.
Alan Permane, who runs Racing Bulls, has now described the state Lawson was in when he came back. On F1's Beyond The Grid podcast, the team principal said the returning driver was visibly diminished.
"He didn't really say much about it to start with, honestly, his head was down," Permane said. "We obviously knew him from the year before, we could tell he certainly wasn't the same guy, and I don't want to say we rebuilt him because that's a little bit dramatic, but we just supported and helped him where we could."
The demotion itself had been swift and public. A crash in Australia and a last-place qualifying effort for both the sprint and the Grand Prix in China were enough for Red Bull to move him aside. Christian Horner later admitted the team had "asked too much of him too soon." Lawson, for his part, said he was "surprised" at how fast the axe fell and felt he had never been handed a fair run.
Permane's answer was to strip the job back to its essentials. "What I said to him last year was, 'forget anything outside of this'... there's nothing that should be more important than this, don't worry about this flight or that flight, or this hotel," he recalled. "You can see that with him this year. He's laser-focused, it's a bit of a cliché, but he is, and I'm really pleased that you can see that in his driving."
Then came the compliment that turned heads. Permane suggested elite drivers succeed precisely because they refuse to be boxed into one method. "I don't think Fernando [Alonso] has a driving style, I don't think Max [Verstappen] has a driving style. I think they just drive the car however it needs to be driven to go quickest," he said. "I think Liam is doing a little bit of that this year, he's figuring out how to drive these cars."
The wider press has read the arc the same way. Motorsport Week argued the "embarrassing" demotion was the catalyst for his 2026 revival, while PlanetF1, having called the exit "borderline embarrassing," now holds him up as a recovery story.
Hungary should help on the stopwatch as well. Team-mate Arvid Lindblad ran a fresh upgrade at Spa and came home ninth; Lawson, still on the older package, slipped out of the points in twelfth for the first time in six rounds. He gets the updated chassis at the Hungaroring, where Racing Bulls sit level with Alpine on 61 points — a midfield scrap that could shape both teams' seasons before the break.
