It may be the unluckiest retirement of the 2026 season, and the driver who caused it never touched the car. Liam Lawson finished ninth at Barcelona; Nico Hulkenberg's Audi, running where it should have been scoring, was killed on lap 29 by a single stone the New Zealander flicked off the track.
Hulkenberg had been hounding Lawson, unhappy with his defence into Turn 1, when the race turned on a freak chain of events at Turn 12.
"He put a wheel in the gravel exit of Turn 12, kicked up a lot of gravel, and that gravel somehow, one stone pulled the emergency trigger on the left of the roll hoop," Hulkenberg told media including RacingNews365. "It just killed the car. It was a total switch-off and game over. The car was dead, and then obviously I just coasted into the pit lane. There was nothing left; it was just a complete shutdown."
For a driver of Hulkenberg's mileage, it was a first. "I've never seen or heard about this happening, to be honest, in my career. Very unlucky," he said. "Strange, the timing of that. When you see what happened at the end, two cars dropping out — I don't know, it's somehow... The racing world doesn't want us to score yet."
Lawson, when the explanation finally reached him, could barely believe it. "Are you serious?! No way," he said. "Oh, that's so unfortunate. Obviously I had no idea. If I could perfectly aim for something like that, it would be quite impressive! But I had no idea, I just knew that he dropped out."
It was a brutal outcome for Audi, who felt they had the measure of both Racing Bulls and midfield pacesetters Alpine. With Gabriel Bortoleto's sister car already compromised by a turbo problem at the start, a points-rich afternoon yielded nothing.
The slapstick obscured the more meaningful trend, though: Lawson is in the middle of the steadiest stretch of his grand prix career. Ninth in Spain meant points in five of the last six races, lifting him to tenth in the standings on 28 points — already closing in on his entire 2025 tally with plenty of season left.
His team principal set the brief over the winter and likes what he is seeing. "I truly see genius in him," Alan Permane told PlanetF1. "What he needs to do, and what he is doing so far, is eliminate mistakes. It's working on the consistency."
Lawson kept the credit with the garage. "We've managed to score points in most races, which is a testament to the hard work everyone is putting in," he said after Barcelona. "We're in a good place as a team and there's a lot to be optimistic about, so I'm looking forward to Austria and excited to see what we can achieve there."
That optimism has a basis. The Red Bull Ring on 29 June is where Lawson broke through with sixth place last year, and Racing Bulls — sixth in the constructors' table — are within range of Alpine for best of the rest, a fight his clean weekends keep nudging their way.
