Liam Lawson issues Fernando Alonso feud response after 'screw me' promise kept

Liam Lawson had a heated battle with Fernando Alonso in Austin.

Liam Lawson revealed Fernando Alonso “said he would screw me” after their heated battle in the Sprint in Austin, and the VCARB driver thinks the two-time World Champion “kept his word” by cutting in front of him in qualifying.

The pair were seen in discussion after Alonso called Lawson “such an idiot” for his defence of 16th place on his return to the Formula 1 grid on Saturday, and the Aston Martin driver later exited the pit lane behind the New Zealander late in Q1, only to loop around him to get ahead.

Additional reporting by Elizabeth Blackstock

Upon being told that Alonso had moved ahead in the queue, Lawson responded to his race engineer: “Yeah I know mate, he’s doing exactly what he said he would do,” hinting that some kind of response to their Sprint battle had been pre-meditated.

Lawson had already known ahead of qualifying that he would be starting at the back of the grid, with 60 places’ worth of grid penalties coming his way for fresh power unit components being applied to his car, but he still made it through to Q2 on Saturday before not setting a time in the second part of qualifying.

As for his and Alonso’s heated discussion after the Sprint, the VCARB driver said the two-time World Champion was “really upset” with what transpired between them on track at the Circuit of The Americas – with Alonso believing Lawson went too far in his defence of P16.

In defending his driving, the 22-year-old added that if he had driven illegally, then the FIA would have intervened.

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“He said he would screw me, and I guess he kept his word,” Lawson said of Alonso to media including PlanetF1.com after qualifying.

“I don’t know, he was really upset. I’m not sure why, we were racing for P16, and I don’t know why he was he so upset,

“It is what it is. Hopefully he can get over it.

“I understand he had a pretty horrible race, so I can understand why he’s upset, but if I did anything wrong, I would have got a penalty.”

When asked if a newfound ‘rivalry’ with a double World Champion had been on the list of things he had anticipated heading into his first weekend back on the grid, Lawson was quick to shut down that idea – and is looking to move on from it.

“I don’t think we have a rivalry, I think we just had an incident in a race and hopefully we can just get over it and move forward,” he concluded.

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