Lawson: 'We're still figuring it out' ahead of 2026 opener

So Liam, it all starts here again. How are you feeling after pre-season testing? What's the mood in the camp at this point? I mean it's just a lot of unknowns right now. It's obviously exciting to see what these new cars bring to the sport, but for us it's definitely a different feeling to where I came in last year in a regulation period right at the end of it, so the cars are fully developed and as they are, whereas this year we're still figuring them out, so it's going to be very interesting. Looks like it could be a pretty competitive midfield fight. I know you haven't hit the track here this weekend. What's your feeling at the moment about where you might stack up and how many races do you think it will take before we get a clear picture on pecking order, all that kind of thing? To be fair, I think you probably figure out pretty quickly even this weekend who's quick and who's not. Obviously we have no idea in testing what everybody's doing, so it'll be this weekend tomorrow that we find out exactly where we sit. Also here it's very tough on energy so it's quite a unique track, one of the hardest ones we go to, so that obviously makes things even more challenging for a weekend one, but yeah I think you'll see pretty quickly where everybody sits. And just a final one, debut weekend for your new teammate of course, what advice would you give to him going into this experience? I don't know, I would say, I think now obviously you have a lot of preparation into Formula One before even in junior categories, obviously he's done quite a few, or a few tests, FP1, stuff like that, but once you're in the sport it's all of you guys and all the noise that is around the sport that's probably a big, a new thing, probably a lot more intense than what you're used to before F1, so finding time for yourself and making sure you're focused. Thanks Dean. Thank you. Liam you're talking about this and it is an energy limited track and yet one or two of maybe Red Bull's rivals have said that power unit of yours is particularly effective harvesting and deploying, could you be relatively quite strong here then? Hypothetically maybe, I just have no idea, like it's something that we really will find out on track and I think honestly there's a lot of talk about power units but realistically we don't know what other people have been using, whether they've been turned up or not, and yeah I think ours has been very strong and it's been okay but I don't really see any reason why it's that much stronger than everybody else's, I think it's, yeah a lot of words at the moment but something we'll find out on track pretty quickly. Is there the potential for an unusual result, I mean we've rehearsed the starts and so on, it seems we've got a bit of a handle on that but for a team like yours in the midfield, is there the potential to you know to pounce on something and get a better result than you maybe normally would? I think in a year like this there's definitely more potential for something like that, where things are, and I think even reliability wise it's obviously at the early part of the season a very important thing for us, a lot of focus just into having a car that is you know lasting a race and operating as we want it to, so there's definitely more opportunity but the faster you are the better you're going to score mainly and that's what we're focused on. I can tell already Liam Lawson on the podium this weekend, you heard it there first. In terms of energy management, you mentioned a bit about it and how tough that's going to be on this track, do you already have any idea how to do that here because we hear all of you guys, all of you drivers saying that it's going to be so tough this weekend and can you explain it a bit to our audience, what do we need to think of? We just don't have enough energy to basically do a lap with full power, with full throttle like we would normally want to, so somewhere in there we have to save some energy because otherwise we run out before the end of the end of the lap, so that's something that is going to be a thing on most tracks but on tracks like this where turn three, after turn three you're very much on throttle for a lot of the lap with very little lifting, you're deploying without harvesting and I think that's where the challenge is going to come here. So it's a lot more opportunity for us as drivers to try and capitalise on that but there will be, I'm sure there will be a system that everybody gets, there will be a best way to do it that everybody will adapt to and be figuring out, it's just who can do that the quickest.