F1’s Liam Lawson has unreleased songs waiting to be heard

Liam Lawson’s life turned upside-down in September when he replaced Daniel Ricciardo at VCARB mid-season. Understandably, a couple of his hobbies — specifically, recording music and vlogging on YouTube— have since fallen to the wayside. “Yeah, I’ve gotten just a little bit busy recently,” Lawson told me with a laugh.

Clearly a bit of a romantic, the 22-year-old New Zealander likes to strum and sing, particularly acoustic-y ballads. Lawson spent some time in the recording studio shortly before he was called up to the team full-time. “The guys that I play with are a couple of my really close friends, so we got together the night before to choose the songs [that we wanted to cover], then went into the studio and recorded them,” he said. You might have seen an outtake or two floating around the Internet.

Back in June, he posted that we’d hear the tracks soon — but no such luck. Turns out, landing a permanent seat in Formula 1 really puts a crimp in your hobbies. Even if you’ve been at them for decade or more.

“When I was younger, around 10 or 11, I wrote my own songs,” Lawson explained. “I think I was pretty obsessed with girls, even when I was very young, so I probably wrote songs about my crush in primary school.” Lawson’s partner, biomedical science student Hannah St. John, jogged his memory. “Well, when he was 12, he wrote a song with the title ‘Pain,’” she chimed in.

“I must have been going through something,” Lawson said. “You know when you’re a kid and everything feels a thousand times more dramatic than it really is — that was probably one of those things.” He continued, “I would love to do more with music, but to be good at anything, you need to put a lot of time into it.” Even if it is the off-season, the day job’s taking precedence.

That goes double for Lawson’s nascent vlogging career. He kicked off the YouTube channel only a year ago, putting out videos about everything from a day at DisneyLand to building a project car (later sold for charity) to viewing a SpaceX flight. He’s built up nearly 91,000 subscribers, but hung up the lapel microphone, at least temporarily, five months ago.

“[Vlogging] is something I really enjoy doing, [but] with anything I do, I want it to be really good,” he explained. “I don’t like to do anything that’s not done properly. It’s the same with the music stuff, and why I never released any of it. It was recorded so last minute that, although it came out really cool, I know we can do a better job.”

“I don’t want to post videos every three weeks on random days and not have them fully put together,” he said. “I’d like to do it properly. So maybe, when I get a bit more structure going, we’ll do some more of it.”

Though his life could get a bit more hectic in the near future, depending on how certain things shake out.

Watch my full road-trip interview with Lawson below.