Liam Lawson’s six-race 2025 Red Bull audition was one of the biggest talking points ahead of the United States Grand Prix - but nobody expected it to kick off with a bizarre feud with Fernando Alonso.
It appears to have its roots in Lawson and Alonso’s intense battle for 15th and 16th in the Austin sprint race on Saturday afternoon.
That fight began on the opening lap of the race when Lawson dived down the inside of Alonso at the Turn 11 left-hander before the main straight, a move which sent the Aston off the track.
Alonso tried to come back at Lawson before the Turn 12 left-hander but found Lawson’s RB aggressively blocking him off before and within the braking zone.
That defence as well as later defences from Lawson into that same corner triggered memories of Alonso’s huge shunt with now team-mate Lance Stroll in that same place in 2022.
“On the straight, I think we nearly crashed, like I did with Lance two years ago, at 300 km/h or something, and then, the way he squeezed, out of the corners, to the track limits itself, in lap one of [19],” Alonso said when asked what aspect of Lawson’s defence irritated him.
He said he didn’t want to “make a big thing of it” but said there was only no penalty because he was the one who lifted off and avoided a collision.
The aggressive Lawson defence on lap six cost both drivers a position to Esteban Ocon and led to Alonso radioing his Aston team to say “man that AlphaTauri is such an idiot”. Thereafter Alonso slipped away from Lawson and eventually dropped a place to Alex Albon too, finishing 18th.
Alonso said he was very surprised Lawson fought so hard for 16th place, with points only on offer to the top eight in a sprint race.
He confronted Lawson after the race, but the RB driver was adamant he hadn’t done anything wrong - something the race director Niels Wittich agreed with as he didn’t refer Lawson’s driving to the stewards.
“He had a pretty horrible race so I can understand why he's upset,” Lawson said.
“But, you know, if I did anything wrong, I would have got a penalty. So, yeah…”
Lawson denied that this was the start of a rivalry: “I don't think we have a rivalry. I think we just had an incident in the race and hopefully, we can just get over it and move forward.”
Alonso took payback?
The mini-feud didn’t stop at the sprint race with Alonso seemingly making a point at the start of grand prix qualifying.
As the green light came on for the start of Q1, Alonso overtook Lawson’s RB on the run to Turn 1 out of the pits, an unusual move in a qualifying session.
“What happened in qualifying? Ah, well, because I had the scrubbed set [of tyres], so I was not really into a timed lap, so I didn't want to lose more time,” Alonso explained.
“And I think it didn't change too much to him. But yeah, today, in the sprint, I think, yeah, we …he fought very hard, in my opinion, for 16th, 17th. But nothing we can do.”
But Lawson thought this was evidence of Alonso allegedly telling Lawson after the sprint that he was going to take payback.
“He said he would screw me, and I guess he kept his word,” Lawson said. “I don't know. He was really upset. I'm not sure why - we were racing for P16, and I don't know why he was so upset.
“It is what it is. Hopefully, he can get over it. And we'll move forward.”
When asked what he discussed with Lawson in their chat after the sprint Alonso said “that is between us”.
Lawson’s ‘he said he would screw me’ comment was put to Alonso with the question of whether the qualifying overtake was him actioning that.
Alonso said “No, not really. Everyone on track is behaving as he wants, and for me, today was unnecessary.
“Everyone can have different opinions. I'm OK with that. You know, it's 24 races, so you meet somewhere in the journey.”
All a bit unnecessary?
This was certainly an unexpectedly left-field outcome from Lawson’s F1 return.
Was Lawson pushing the boundaries of the racing rules? Yes. Did he come fairly close to repeating Alonso’s scary 2022 shunt with Stroll on the main straight? Yes. Was it slightly extreme for a fight for 15th-17th? Yes.
But you have to remember that Lawson is fighting to be Max Verstappen’s Red Bull team-mate.
Every single session of this six-weekend audition is being heavily scrutinised. That there’s no points on offer might be a reason for Alonso and Aston to risk less but to Lawson, it might as well have been a fight for points given what’s at stake for him.
He needs to show a great deal of ability and skill in a very short space of time and doesn’t have the job security that Alonso has earned over his two decades in the sport.
Lawson kept his defence just within the rules and he did the kind of inch-perfect defensive driving we’ve seen from Alonso plenty of times. And Alonso doesn’t always get the balance right either.
Don’t forget Alonso has eight penalty points on his licence - three of those for “driving unnecessarily slowly, erratically or in a manner which could be deemed potentially dangerous”, defensive driving that caused George Russell to crash in Melbourne.
He picked up another three for clipping Carlos Sainz during an elbows-out defence in Shanghai and the other two for running into the back of Zhou Guanyu in Austria.
The difference was Lawson didn’t break any rules with his defence in the sprint. He was just making the most of a chance to demonstrate his racecraft in his high-pressure, time-limited audition.