Liam Lawson had just landed in the UK for what he assumed would be another quiet week of preparation with Racing Bulls. He had not stepped off the plane when the call from his team principal Alan Permane came through.

“I literally landed, I hadn’t even got off the plane,” Lawson told Crash.net.

“I had come from basically being on break and landed in the UK for what I thought was going to be obviously VCARB prep. Alan called me and basically he told me what was going on.”

What was going on was Isack Hadjar’s wrist. Red Bull’s regular driver had fractured it in his home gym, punching a heavy bag during the summer shutdown. The team confirmed on 19 August that Hadjar would miss the Dutch Grand Prix, with Lawson slotting into the RB22 and Yuki Tsunoda taking his Racing Bulls seat.

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A lonely six-point drive

Lawson qualified eighth, reaching Q3 for the first time as a Red Bull driver and finishing 0.115 seconds behind Max Verstappen. Sunday’s race then handed him a running start: Verstappen misjudged the damp Zandvoort surface and crashed at Turn 14 on the first lap, forcing a red flag and pushing the New Zealander into the top six.

He held station for most of the afternoon, briefly running as high as fifth in the pit-stop cycles before settling into a lonely seventh, roughly 30 seconds adrift of Oscar Piastri. A late virtual safety car killed his final attempt to close on the McLaren.

A 10-second penalty for a yellow-flag infringement at Turn 3 was added post-race but did not change his classification, according to the NZ Herald, because he had built more than 15 seconds of cushion to the cars behind.

“It was a pretty lonely race for me, we just struggled to match the guys in front. I knew it would be a hard race, but I didn’t expect it to be that hard.”

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Lando Norris won the race, from Kimi Antonelli and George Russell.

“You can see it as well”

“It’s great. It’s something I’ve always known that with different circumstances, things would have gone differently,” Lawson told Motorsport.com.

“But maybe to you guys and to the world, now you can see it as well.”

The reference point was 2025, when Lawson lasted two races in the senior Red Bull seat at the start of the season before being swapped back to Racing Bulls in favour of Tsunoda. Team principal Laurent Mekies said the Zandvoort recall was long overdue.

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“I’m sure it was not the end that he deserved,” Mekies told News.gp.

“If we look at how he has managed to reconstruct from there, to rebuild, and the level of performance he has been showing ever since, consistently, with the old generation of car, with this generation of car, I think it’s very well deserved that he gets that chance.”

He later called Q3 “a fantastic result” for a driver dropped into an unfamiliar car with a single practice session.

The route he already knew

Zandvoort had also given Lawson his F1 debut three years earlier, under almost identical conditions. In 2023 Daniel Ricciardo crashed heavily in FP2 and broke a metacarpal in his left hand; AlphaTauri handed the car to a 21-year-old reserve. That weekend also produced a 10-second penalty and a finish well shy of the pace, but it opened the door to five races with the team that year.

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Hadjar targets Monza

Red Bull is treating the absence as short-term. Hadjar is hopeful of returning for the Italian Grand Prix at Monza on 6 September, though the team has warned against rushing back. If he makes it, Lawson goes back to Racing Bulls. If he does not, the RB22 stays with him.

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