F1’s Liam Lawson’s unreleased songs wait to be heard

Liam Lawson’s life was turned upside down in September when he replaced Daniel Ricciardo in the VCARB mid-season. Apparently, some of his hobbies – in particular, recording music and vlogging on youtube – has since fallen by the wayside. “Yeah, I’ve been a little busy lately,” Lawson told me, laughing.

Apparently a bit of a romantic, the 22-year-old New Zealander loves to strum and sing, especially acoustic-y ballads. Lawson spent some time in the recording studio shortly before being called into the team full-time. He said, “Some of the people I play with are very close friends of mine, so we got together the night before to pick songs (that we wanted to cover), then went into the studio and recorded them. ” You may have seen an outtake or two floating around on the internet.

In June, he posted that we would hear the track soon – but no such luck. Turns out, getting a permanent seat in Formula 1 really boils down to your hobby. Even if you’ve been working on them for a decade or more.

Lawson explained, “When I was little, about 10 or 11 years old, I wrote my own songs.” “I think even when I was very young, I was quite obsessed with girls, so I probably wrote songs about my crushes in elementary school.” Lawson’s fellow biomedical sciences student Hannah St. John recalled her memories. “Well, when he was 12, he wrote a song titled ‘Pain,'” she said.

“I’m definitely going through a rough patch,” Lawson said. “You know when you’re a kid and everything seems a thousand times more dramatic than it actually is – this was probably one of those things.” He added, “I would love to work more with music, but to be good at anything, you have to put a lot of time into it.” Even though it is off-season, day work is being given priority.

This goes double for Lawson’s budding vlogging career. He started the YouTube channel just over a year ago, posting videos about everything from a day at Disneyland to building a project car (later sold for charity) to watching a SpaceX flight. He’s racked up about 91,000 subscribers, but five months ago, he turned off the lapel microphone, at least temporarily.

“(Vlogging) is something I really enjoy doing, (but) whatever I do, I want it to be really good,” he explained. “I don’t like doing anything that isn’t done properly. It’s the same with music stuff, and why I never released it. It was recorded at the last minute, although it was really good, I know we could do a better job.

“I don’t want to post videos on random days every three weeks or put them together completely,” he said. “I’d like to do it right. So maybe when I get a little more structure, we’ll do something more with it.”

Although their lives may get a little more hectic in the near future, it depends on how some things shock,

Watch my full road-trip interview with Lawson below.