Here's the thing, an already chaotic weekend just got significantly worse for Liam Lawson at the Mexico City Grand Prix. The Racing Bulls driver has been completely stripped of his qualifying result after a technical breach on his machine was uncovered by the officials.
Originally, the New Zealander had put together a genuinely stunning session to take an impressive eighth place on the grid, sitting right ahead of his team mate Arvid Lindblad. That eighth position was already carrying a caveat, mind you, because Lawson was already facing a one-place grid penalty coming from an earlier incident with Red Bull's Max Verstappen during second practice. But that minor penalty is now the least of his worries.
After crossing the line on his fastest lap in Q2, the FIA Technical Delegate flagged that the car was in breach of the minimum MGU-K power requirement. The official report laid it out clearly: the driver maximum power demand and the electrical DC power of the ERS-K dropped off at greater rates than the regulations allow.
Following the session, representatives from Racing Bulls, Lawson himself, the Single Seater Sporting Director, and members of the FIA Technical team sat down with the stewards. The resulting evidence proved that once Lawson crossed the control line at the finish of his flying lap in Q2, he simply did not lift off the power immediately. That delay meant the car failed to achieve the required rate of reduction for MGU-K deployment, missing the regulated step down entirely.
Racing Bulls argued that the infraction did not grant the car any performance advantage whatsoever. The stewards acknowledged that point and even noted that the team itself self-disclosed the breach, but the rules are absolute. As the decision document made painfully clear, non-compliance with the Technical Regulations cannot be excused just because no lap time or performance was gained, and a car must remain fully compliant at every single moment of an event. Precedents left the stewards with no alternative, and the disqualification pushes Lawson straight to the back of the grid for the main race.
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