Liam Lawson Will Headline a Live Gig in Austin With His Childhood Band

Most drivers spend the Thursday of a Grand Prix weekend in media sessions. Liam Lawson will spend his on a stage in east Austin, playing a headline set with the band he had as a kid. Racing Bulls announced on Friday that Lawson will top the bill at its Garage Sessions event on October 22, the evening before the United States Grand Prix begins, and launch a signature guitar in the process, The Race reports. He has raced in front of hundreds of thousands of people. He has never played a gig in front of anyone.

What is Lawson doing in Austin on Thursday night?

Headlining his team’s music and culture event. The Esses Bazaar runs from 3pm at Inn Cahoots on East 6th Street, with live music, food, western wear, tattoo and glam stations and the Racing Bulls show car, and Garage Sessions follows at 7pm, The Race reports. Lawson performs with his former childhood bandmates, his brother and two close friends. The wider bill mixes emerging talent with established songwriters, Jonathan Capeci, Scoot Teasley, Jess Farren and Alison Nichols among them, and Drake Milligan, who headlined the inaugural F1 Grid Gig at last year’s Austin race, closes the evening, PlanetF1 reports. Austin is a weekend that collects side stories; this year’s also carries the first chance for Kimi Antonelli to become the sport’s youngest champion, and now it has a support act with a racing licence.

What is the guitar he will be playing?

His own model. The Taylor Guitars LL30 GS Mini Special Edition is finished in a pink-to-white ombre with his racing number 30 in the centre, The Race reports, and PlanetF1 adds that a cartoon found on his helmet features in the design, on the pickguard. MotorBiscuit reports the truss rod cover carries his signature cartoon logo, the same mark as on his helmet. The set is the launch of his partnership with Taylor Guitars, which is why the instrument is a product and a prop at once: he will play the guitar he is selling, in the colours he races in, the night before he races. Drivers lend their names to watches and headphones routinely. A signature guitar you are expected to perform on, competently, in public, is a different category of endorsement, closer to Max Verstappen stepping into a GT3 car at Portimao and collecting a reprimand than to a photo call: the second skill has to survive contact with an audience.

Why does this performance start at age six?

Because the band came before the karting career settled. Lawson’s father played in a band throughout his childhood and encouraged both sons to play from the age of six, The Race reports. Lawson called the Austin plan a full circle moment for exactly that reason: launching the partnership while performing with his brother and the two friends he grew up playing with. His own explanation of what music does in a season is a driver’s one. He uses it to clear his head, he said, and the Garage Sessions set is a chance to connect with fans outside the track. The paddock has heard him play in fragments for years, in social clips and in a jam with country artist Warren Zeiders, and he taught his team-mate Isack Hadjar guitar last year, Crash.net reports. What it has not seen is a set list, a stage and a paying crowd.

Is any driver supposed to have done this before?

Not as a headline act, on Crash.net’s reporting. It describes Lawson as the first active Formula 1 driver to headline a live music set during a Grand Prix weekend, and the Austin performance as his first live musical appearance in front of an audience. The comparison Crash.net draws is with Charles Leclerc, whose classical piano playing is a private pursuit released as recordings. Lawson’s version is less protected: a band, a borrowed bar, his brother next to him and no editing suite between the performance and the verdict. In a season where the same paddock argued about whether sprint races belong at tracks where cars cannot pass, Austin’s Thursday experiment asks a simpler question about what a Grand Prix weekend is for.

What happens next, on stage and on track?

Thursday first, then the championship. PlanetF1 notes the announcement lands while Lawson’s 2027 seat remains unconfirmed, with F2 driver Nikola Tsolov waiting in the wings, in a market that has already moved once this month as Haas signed Rafael Camara to field the youngest line-up on the grid. A driver whose future is being discussed in those terms could pick worse weeks to remind everyone, promoters included, that he is one of the grid’s most marketable personalities. Then the music stops. Practice at the Circuit of the Americas starts on Friday, on a track Verstappen has already warned is bumpy enough to need a new spine, and Lawson’s weekend becomes the ordinary kind, measured in tenths rather than songs. Whatever happens on Sunday, the strangest line on his Austin itinerary is already written: support act, himself.