The Red Bull garage Lawson walked back into is not the one that dropped him after two race weekends at the start of 2025. It is now run by Laurent Mekies, who was still his boss at Racing Bulls a year ago, and Lawson says the shared history is doing real work.

Speaking to RacingNews365, Lawson said he has spent far more time working with Mekies, first at VCARB and now at Red Bull, than he ever did with Christian Horner.

“He’s somebody I have a good relationship with working at VCARB, and that probably makes the transition a bit nicer as well.”

Horner, by contrast, had him for two race weekends and no more. Lawson told the same outlet that he does not have much sense of how the team ran back then.

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“I didn’t spend long enough to really get to know [Horner].”

Horner puts the call on Mintzlaff and Marko

The demotion has been reopened this year by Horner in his own words. Speaking to Netflix cameras for the Drive to Survive season covering 2025, Horner said it “wasn’t my choice” to swap Lawson for Yuki Tsunoda after two rounds, laying the call at the door of Red Bull GmbH chief Oliver Mintzlaff, with long-serving motorsport advisor Helmut Marko in his ear.

“I was always pushed to take drivers from the young driver programme. Helmut was a big driver in it,” Horner said in the same episode.

Both men have since left the team. Horner was removed as Red Bull team principal in mid-2025, and Marko departed at the end of the same year, with Mekies moving up from Racing Bulls to run the senior operation.

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The stand-in run keeps delivering points

Lawson only returned to the senior seat because Isack Hadjar hurt his wrist in a boxing workout and was ruled out of the Dutch Grand Prix. The injury has since kept the Frenchman out of Monza and Madrid as well, and Lawson has taken all three drives alongside Verstappen.

At Zandvoort he qualified within a tenth of Verstappen and finished seventh. Monza brought a points-less 14th. In Madrid, on the debut Madring layout, he came from eighth on the grid to sixth after passing Pierre Gasly with three laps to go.

Mekies called the Madrid drive “very strong”. Lawson himself was less satisfied, feeling a better result had been within reach before a virtual safety car reshuffled the strategy around him.

The sixth place in Madrid took Lawson to 59 points for the season, the largest total by a New Zealander in a single Formula 1 season, surpassing the 51 Denny Hulme scored during his 1967 title year under a different points system.

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