Zandvoort, 2023: an injury to Daniel Ricciardo opened up a seat in the Red Bull stable, and the reserve driver who filled it was a New Zealander with no grand prix starts to his name. Three years on, the same circuit has produced something very similar. Isack Hadjar has hurt his wrist in a gym session during the summer shutdown, and so an unexpected Liam Lawson Red Bull return happens this weekend — in the senior car, alongside Max Verstappen. Motorsport.com’s Filip Cleeren, in his assessment of Lawson’s Red Bull call-up, reached for “cosmic karma or poetic justice”. Either works.
Red Bull confirmed the change on Wednesday, hours after word of Hadjar’s injury broke, and has confirmed Lawson only for the Dutch Grand Prix. It is also the first time Lawson has been put in the senior car since the team took him out of it after two race weekends in 2025 — a demotion abrupt enough to become the defining line in his biography. Whatever he does at Zandvoort will be read against it.
What the Liam Lawson Red Bull call-up actually rewards
The 2025 episode was brutal. Lawson was promoted ahead of Yuki Tsunoda, given a difficult car and not enough time in it, then sent back down after two weekends. Cleeren’s argument is that what happened next is the reason this call-up is deserved: rather than sour, the 24-year-old rebuilt himself into a more complete driver over the seasons since, helping lift Racing Bulls to sixth in the constructors’ standings.
Lawson’s own account of the demotion, given at the end of last year, is notably free of self-pity. “I would have liked to have thought that with the right amount of time, I would have got my head around it honestly,” he said. “Two races was… I honestly don’t even really remember them. But a lot of things have happened this year that have made me a lot stronger.” He has been willing to say how the episode was framed against him, too: in June he set out how Red Bull used his China race against him.
Hadjar’s absence, and the seat he beat Lawson to
The uncomfortable subtext is that Lawson gets this weekend only because the driver who beat him to the seat is unavailable. Hadjar’s edge was seat time: he raced the full 2025 season, and per Cleeren held a single-lap advantage over Lawson that kept narrowing. On that basis the 2026 promotion went his way, and Motorsport.com’s verdict is that it was the logical call.
Hadjar therefore sits out Zandvoort in the same week the FIA set a date — next week — to hear his own team’s appeal over Monaco. Red Bull and McLaren are challenging the reinstatement of Pierre Gasly’s podium there, the third place Hadjar briefly held after the Alpine driver was hit with two five-second pitlane penalties.
Zandvoort raises the stakes on a stand-in drive
The setting sharpens everything. Motorsport.com notes that this is set to be the last Dutch round of Verstappen’s home career, which makes a substitute in the second Red Bull an awkward footnote to a farewell. It also fixes Lawson’s benchmark for the weekend: Verstappen. The same reshuffle brings Tsunoda back to the grid, as The Race has reported, in the Racing Bulls car Lawson leaves behind — the driver Red Bull swapped him for in 2025.
None of this is a second promotion. What Lawson has been handed is one weekend of evidence in the senior car, on the track where his career began, replacing an injured driver in it for the second time. He has had worse hands to play.
