Liam Lawson Admits the Pursuit of F1 Has Cost Him His Happiness: ‘It Sounds Quite Sad’

• Liam Lawson told the High Performance Podcast that the relentless chase for F1 success has cost him “probably just happiness,” because he refuses to feel content until he hits his targets.
• He revealed that his parents recently found a card his younger brother wrote as a small child, asking their father if he would get more of his time if he also took up racing.
• Lawson laid out years of family sacrifice, including his parents selling the family home to fund his karting before Red Bull signed him to its junior programme in 2019.

Liam Lawson does not do self-pity. Across a brutal eighteen months that took him to a Red Bull race seat and then snatched it away after two grands prix, the New Zealander has stayed almost defiantly level. So when he sat down with Jake Humphrey and Professor Damian Hughes on the High Performance Podcast and was asked a simple question about what all of this has cost him, the honesty in his answer caught even him off guard.

“It sounds quite sad,” he said, “but it’s probably just happiness.” For a driver who has spent his whole life being told to keep his emotions in check, it was a strikingly open admission. And it was not even the most affecting moment of the conversation.

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The card nobody was meant to find

The detail that has travelled furthest from the interview is a small handwritten card. Lawson explained that his parents recently came across a note his younger brother had written years earlier, when he was only about five or six years old. It was addressed to their father.

The message was short and devastating in its innocence. The little boy had asked whether, if he took up racing too, their dad would spend more time with him, the way he did with Liam. It was not a complaint. It was a child trying to work out the rules of a household that had quietly reorganised itself around one son’s talent.

Lawson did not tell the story to win sympathy. He told it because it forced him to see, years later, the true scale of what his family had given up so that he could keep chasing a seat in Formula 1. The card put a face to a sacrifice that had always been there but rarely spoken about.

The house, and the holidays that never happened

The financial side of that sacrifice was already well documented. To keep Lawson in competitive machinery as he climbed the karting and junior ladders, his parents sold the family home. There were no holidays, few of the ordinary family routines other children took for granted, and a constant churn of travel and expense aimed at one goal.

That gamble paid off in 2019, when Red Bull brought Lawson into its junior programme and took on the cost of his career. But the years before that left a mark, and the brother’s card is a reminder that the bill was not only paid in money. It was paid in time, in attention, and in the small everyday moments a family does not get back.

Lawson is clear-eyed about how fortunate he is to be on the grid at all. That is precisely why the cost lands so hard. He knows exactly what was traded, and by whom, to get him there.

Why happiness keeps slipping out of reach

The line about happiness was not a throwaway. Pressed on it, Lawson explained that his drive comes with a built-in trap. He does not let himself enjoy where he is until he has reached the next goal, and the next goal keeps moving. Contentment, in other words, is always one result away.

It is a mindset that has made him relentless on track and, by his own account, restless off it. The same refusal to settle that dragged him back from the lowest point of his career is also the thing that stops him from sitting still long enough to feel good about any of it. He is not asking for the trade to be undone. He is simply naming it.

From the lowest point back to the grid

The context behind the reflection is one of the harshest stretches any young driver has faced in recent memory. Lawson was promoted into the senior Red Bull seat, then moved back to the junior team after just two rounds, a demotion that played out in full public view. The social media response, he has said, was vicious.

Rather than fold, he rebuilt. He steadied himself back at Racing Bulls, rediscovered the form that had earned him the chance in the first place, and did enough to keep his place on the grid alongside rookie Arvid Lindblad while Isack Hadjar moved up to partner Max Verstappen. Humphrey, who has interviewed most of the grid, called it one of the most incredible conversations he has hosted, and suggested Lawson is now driving the best he ever has.

That is the version of Lawson the paddock sees: composed, quick, hard to rattle. The podcast offered the other version, the one shaped by a sold house, a stack of missed holidays and a younger brother’s card. Both are true. The chase has given him a career most kids only dream about. It has also, by his own honest reckoning, quietly taken something back.

The hate he learned to live with

The happiness Lawson describes has been tested in public more than most. When he was dropped from the senior Red Bull seat after only two rounds, the reaction online was not measured. He has spoken before about the volume of abuse that came his way, the kind that follows a young driver around for months and waits for him in the replies after every session.

What stands out now is how he has folded that experience into his outlook rather than letting it define him. He talks about the chase for joy as something he is actively working at, not a box he expects to tick by winning a particular race. That is a more grown-up framing than you often hear from a driver still in his early twenties, and it is hard not to connect it to everything his family poured into getting him here.

There is a neat symmetry in the story too. The younger brother whose card cut so deep grew up in the slipstream of Liam’s career, and the sacrifices that note hinted at were made so that one of them could chase something extraordinary. Years on, with the card resurfaced and the demotion survived, Lawson is finally able to look at the whole picture at once: the cost, the gift, and the people who paid for both.

He is not promising that the happiness will arrive on a fixed date, or that a strong run of results will suddenly make him content. If anything, the honesty of the interview was in admitting it might not. What he can offer his family, and the brother who once wondered why racing got the time he wanted, is a version of himself that finally understands the size of what he was given. That awareness, more than any result, sounds like the closest thing to peace he has found as he heads into the Austrian Grand Prix weekend.

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Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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