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Liam Lawson didn’t gradually drift away from social media. He made a decision, deleted everything, and felt immediately better for it. The Racing Bulls driver opened up on the High Performance Podcast about what pushed him to that point — and the answer is about as grim a portrait of modern F1 fandom as you’re likely to hear from inside the paddock.
The breaking point came at Mexico in 2024.
Lawson and Sergio Perez had collided at Turn 5 while racing for position, and the fallout went well beyond the stewards’ room. With Instagram notifications still switched on at the time, Lawson’s phone became a firehose of direct messages the moment the race ended. He described going back through his requests folder as something that still shocks him – the kind of content that, in his words, “you can’t even imagine.” Not comments on posts. DMs. Sent directly to him by fans of a driver he’d just raced hard against.
“There’s so much of that in Formula 1 that when it first starts to happen, it’s more of a: ‘Wait, that’s totally wrong,'” Lawson said. “And then you start to really think about it. But honestly, it’s happened so much now, especially with all that’s happened over the last 12 months, that you just start to ignore it, to be honest, because there’s so many opinions and rumours and things that go around that are just so untrue. If you really focus on every single one, it would drive you crazy.”
His response was to wipe his apps, went the rest of the 2024 season without any social media, then reinstalled at the start of 2025 with a new approach: mute everything F1-related and keep only the feeds from friends.
He still posts on Instagram for fans and to keep up with friends and family, but has been absent from X for almost a year.
“Every single Formula 1 account is muted. It’s just completely muted. So I don’t see anything to do with it online. I had people telling me, ‘Oh, do you hear about this?’ No, no idea,” Lawson explained. When asked if it helped: “For me, it did. Yeah, for me it made a big difference.”
Lawson received substantial online abuse first after being chosen as Daniel Ricciardo‘s replacement during the 2024 season, and then again after replacing Perez at Red Bull. Hateful comments continued after he was demoted back to Racing Bulls following just two races.
That’s three separate waves of abuse in roughly twelve months, each tied to a roster move he had no particular control over.
Lawson is far from alone.
Kimi Antonelli received an extraordinary amount of abuse after making a mistake in Qatar that allowed Lando Norris to overtake, reducing the points Max Verstappen was set to take from the Briton in the title fight.
Jack Doohan, Yuki Tsunoda, and Lawson have all recently endured verbal attacks from fans, often linked to incidents on track – with Doohan targeted by some Argentinian fans of Franco Colapinto, who sent shocking abuse and personal threats via email.
What Lawson described on the podcast is the structural shift underneath all of it. He included that early social media in F1 was about access – fans thrilled to be able to reach drivers who’d previously felt untouchable. Somewhere along the way, that flipped. The same tools that gave fans a direct line to their favourite driver also gave them a direct line to anyone else in the paddock. The anonymity of a DM request folder made that feel consequence-free.
He sent a message to fans: “It’s really that we’re just normal people at the end of the day. As much as we’re on TV and we are very lucky to be doing this, for us we’re chasing our dreams. Support your driver. We love that when we get the support that we get, but you don’t have to criticise.”
That’s not a complicated ask. Lawson was five years old when he decided he wanted to drive a race car. The fact that reaching that goal now requires learning how to quarantine yourself from the internet is, to put it plainly, a pretty sorry state of affairs.
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The breaking point came at Mexico in 2024.
Lawson and Sergio Perez had collided at Turn 5 while racing for position, and the fallout went well beyond the stewards’ room. With Instagram notifications still switched on at the time, Lawson’s phone became a firehose of direct messages the moment the race ended. He described going back through his requests folder as something that still shocks him – the kind of content that, in his words, “you can’t even imagine.” Not comments on posts. DMs. Sent directly to him by fans of a driver he’d just raced hard against.
“There’s so much of that in Formula 1 that when it first starts to happen, it’s more of a: ‘Wait, that’s totally wrong,'” Lawson said. “And then you start to really think about it. But honestly, it’s happened so much now, especially with all that’s happened over the last 12 months, that you just start to ignore it, to be honest, because there’s so many opinions and rumours and things that go around that are just so untrue. If you really focus on every single one, it would drive you crazy.”
Deleting the Apps Was the Easy Part
His response was to wipe his apps, went the rest of the 2024 season without any social media, then reinstalled at the start of 2025 with a new approach: mute everything F1-related and keep only the feeds from friends.
He still posts on Instagram for fans and to keep up with friends and family, but has been absent from X for almost a year.
“Every single Formula 1 account is muted. It’s just completely muted. So I don’t see anything to do with it online. I had people telling me, ‘Oh, do you hear about this?’ No, no idea,” Lawson explained. When asked if it helped: “For me, it did. Yeah, for me it made a big difference.”
Lawson received substantial online abuse first after being chosen as Daniel Ricciardo‘s replacement during the 2024 season, and then again after replacing Perez at Red Bull. Hateful comments continued after he was demoted back to Racing Bulls following just two races.
That’s three separate waves of abuse in roughly twelve months, each tied to a roster move he had no particular control over.
The Wider Problem Isn’t Going Away
Lawson is far from alone.
Kimi Antonelli received an extraordinary amount of abuse after making a mistake in Qatar that allowed Lando Norris to overtake, reducing the points Max Verstappen was set to take from the Briton in the title fight.
Jack Doohan, Yuki Tsunoda, and Lawson have all recently endured verbal attacks from fans, often linked to incidents on track – with Doohan targeted by some Argentinian fans of Franco Colapinto, who sent shocking abuse and personal threats via email.
What Lawson described on the podcast is the structural shift underneath all of it. He included that early social media in F1 was about access – fans thrilled to be able to reach drivers who’d previously felt untouchable. Somewhere along the way, that flipped. The same tools that gave fans a direct line to their favourite driver also gave them a direct line to anyone else in the paddock. The anonymity of a DM request folder made that feel consequence-free.
He sent a message to fans: “It’s really that we’re just normal people at the end of the day. As much as we’re on TV and we are very lucky to be doing this, for us we’re chasing our dreams. Support your driver. We love that when we get the support that we get, but you don’t have to criticise.”
That’s not a complicated ask. Lawson was five years old when he decided he wanted to drive a race car. The fact that reaching that goal now requires learning how to quarantine yourself from the internet is, to put it plainly, a pretty sorry state of affairs.
Continue reading...
