Before Formula One: Liam Lawson’s Pukekohe Start

Before the Red Bull helmet and the Formula One grid, Liam Lawson was a teenager in a Formula Ford at Pukekohe Park, winning races at a track he could practically see from his house. The most significant racing driver Franklin has produced started the way most local racers start — in a go-kart, on a Saturday, with a parent footing the bill.

The Kid From Pukekohe Road

A Town That Knew Engines

Pukekohe was a racing town before Liam Lawson was born, and it will take a while for anyone to forget that. The V8 Supercars rolled in every November, turning the main street into an unofficial paddock of campervans, merchandise stalls, and people who had driven down from Auckland with coolers and camp chairs. The local speedway ran on Saturday nights through summer, stock cars throwing dirt into the stands while families ate hot chips in the grandstand.

But motorsport in Pukekohe was not just a spectator activity. It was participatory in a way that cities never quite manage. Go-kart tracks operated within a short drive. Fathers who had raced in their twenties taught their kids to drive on farm paddocks before they were old enough for a licence. Mechanical knowledge was not a hobby — it was a basic competency, the kind of thing you picked up the way coastal kids learn to swim.

For a boy growing up in that environment, wanting to race cars was not a dream. It was an obvious next step.

Karting at Five, Racing at Twelve

Lawson was in a go-kart at five. This is not unusual in Franklin — plenty of kids get strapped into karts young. What was unusual was how quickly he stopped looking like the other kids. By eight he was winning club races. By ten he was competing nationally. By twelve, the karting scene had nothing left to teach him.

The family commitment behind those results does not get talked about enough. Motorsport at any level is expensive, and junior motorsport in New Zealand is particularly brutal on families. There is no government funding. There are no scholarships for a ten-year-old who is quick in a kart. Lawson’s father Jed drove him to tracks around the North Island, maintained the kart, paid the entry fees, and did it again the following weekend.

This was a Pukekohe family doing what Pukekohe families did. They just happened to be doing it with a kid who was better at it than anyone his age in the country.

The Park at the End of the Street

Pukekohe Park Raceway sat less than ten minutes from the Lawson family home. For most racing drivers, the track where they learn is somewhere they travel to. For Lawson, it was practically in the neighbourhood.

The circuit itself had character that bigger, more modern tracks lack. Built in 1963 on rolling farmland, it combined high-speed straights with elevation changes that rewarded bravery and punished impatience. The back section dropped away into a dip that you could not see through until you were committed. The final corner was off-camber and tight. It was not a circuit that flattered mediocre drivers.

Lawson learned its rhythms the way a surfer learns a local break — through repetition, through instinct, through being there so often that the track stopped being a technical challenge and became a physical extension of what he could do in a car. When he eventually stepped up to formula racing, the track where he would prove himself was the one he already knew better than anyone in the field.

Formula Ford and the Year Everything Clicked

What Formula Ford Actually Is

Formula Ford is the category that separates kids who are fast from kids who can race. The cars are single-seater open-wheelers — proper racing cars, not karts with bodywork — powered by a standardised 1.6-litre Ford Kent engine that has been the backbone of junior single-seater racing worldwide since the 1960s.

The point of the standardised engine is simple: everyone has the same power, so the result comes down to the driver. There is nowhere to hide. You cannot buy a faster engine or bolt on a trick component. The car does what the driver tells it to do, and the stopwatch tells the truth.

In New Zealand, the Formula Ford Championship has historically been the first rung on the ladder to international racing. Scott Dixon raced Formula Ford. So did Brendon Hartley. The category is a filter — most of the kids who enter discover they are good but not exceptional. The ones who are exceptional tend to leave New Zealand fairly quickly afterward.

The 2015 Season Nobody Expected

Lawson entered the NZ Formula Ford Championship in 2015 as a fourteen-year-old who had never raced a single-seater. Within three rounds, the paddock had stopped asking whether he could adapt from karts and started asking how far he could go.

The gap between Lawson and the rest of the field was not the kind of margin you see from a driver with a better car. It was the kind of margin you see from a driver operating on a different level. He would qualify on pole, pull a gap in the opening laps, and manage the race from the front with a composure that looked wrong on someone that young.

The regulars at Pukekohe — the weekend officials, the marshals, the retired racers who turned up to every meeting with folding chairs and thermoses — had seen plenty of quick kids come through. They had watched talented teenagers win races, celebrate, and then plateau. What they saw in Lawson was different. He was not just fast. He was calm. He made decisions at speed that experienced drivers struggled with. And he did it at a track where the margins between committed and reckless were measured in centimetres.

A Championship at Sixteen

Lawson won the championship at sixteen, which is the kind of sentence that sounds routine until you consider what it actually required. A season-long campaign in single-seaters demands more than raw speed. It demands consistency across different conditions, different circuits, and different types of pressure. It demands racecraft — the ability to overtake cleanly, to defend without wrecking, to know when second place on a bad day is worth more than a DNF from trying to win.

Lawson had all of it. His championship season was not a string of lucky victories. It was a methodical, composed campaign that would have been impressive from a driver ten years older.

The title brought attention. International scouts watch the NZ Formula Ford Championship the way football scouts watch the Chatham Cup — not expecting to find a world-beater every year, but knowing the pathway exists. Lawson’s results earned him an invitation to the Toyota Racing Series, New Zealand’s international junior single-seater championship, which in turn opened the door to European racing programmes.

Pukekohe was suddenly too small.

Franklin’s Motorsport Pipeline

The Track That Built Drivers

Pukekohe Park was not just Liam Lawson’s track. It was the circuit that shaped New Zealand motorsport for sixty years.

The first race meeting was held in 1963, on a layout carved out of the farmland south of town. By the 1970s it was hosting the New Zealand Grand Prix, attracting international drivers who came for the racing and stayed because the circuit was genuinely good. The track evolved over the decades — chicanes added, barriers upgraded, facilities modernised — but it never lost the essential character that made it distinct. The elevation changes. The blind crests. The feeling, on a quick lap, that the track was testing your nerve as much as your skill.

Club racing kept the place alive between the marquee events. Every second weekend, local drivers would turn up with trailer-loads of racing cars and spend the day doing what they had been doing since they were old enough to hold a steering wheel. It was this club-level ecosystem — unglamorous, self-funded, obsessive — that produced the drivers who went on to bigger things.

Who Else Came Through

Lawson is the most prominent name, but he did not emerge from a vacuum. Franklin and the wider South Auckland motorsport community produced a steady stream of drivers who competed nationally and, in some cases, internationally.

The karting clubs around Pukekohe and the Waikato border region fed directly into the formula car categories. Kids who started racing at six or seven would progress through kart classes, move into Formula First or Formula Ford in their mid-teens, and either find their level or keep climbing. The pathway was informal but well-worn. Families knew each other. Mechanics worked on multiple cars. Knowledge passed sideways across garages and paddocks rather than through any formal coaching structure.

The region produced racers the way Hawke’s Bay produces cricketers or the Waikato produces rugby players — not because of any deliberate programme, but because the culture and the infrastructure aligned. There was a track. There were kart clubs. There were families willing to spend their weekends at the circuit. And there was enough local success to make the ambition feel achievable rather than absurd.

After Pukekohe

The Jump Nobody Comes Back From

The trajectory from Pukekohe to Formula One covered about eight years and several thousand kilometres of increasingly competitive racing. After the Formula Ford title, Lawson competed in the Toyota Racing Series against international drivers. He won that too. Then came Europe — Formula 3, racing against the best junior drivers on the planet on circuits he had never seen before.

Red Bull noticed. Their junior driver programme, which had previously signed Brendon Hartley, picked up Lawson and put him on the pathway that leads, if everything goes right, to a Formula One seat. He raced in DTM in Germany. He competed in Super Formula in Japan. Each step was further from Pukekohe, each grid more competitive, each weekend more consequential.

When Daniel Ricciardo broke his hand at the 2023 Dutch Grand Prix, Lawson got the call to replace him at AlphaTauri. He stepped into a Formula One car at Zandvoort and finished the race. A kid from Pukekohe, racing wheel-to-wheel with Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen. The gap between a Formula Ford race at Pukekohe Park and a Formula One Grand Prix is difficult to overstate, yet Lawson crossed it in under a decade.

What the Park Meant

Pukekohe Park held its final motorsport event in April 2023, the same year Lawson made his Formula One debut. The Auckland Thoroughbred Racing club, which owns the land, decided to focus exclusively on horse racing. The circuit that hosted the New Zealand Grand Prix, that drew V8 Supercars from across the Tasman, that gave Liam Lawson his first taste of formula racing — it went quiet.

The closure matters beyond sentiment. A motorsport circuit is not just a piece of asphalt. It is an ecosystem. It is where kids watch their first race, where teenagers learn to drive on a limit, where families spend weekends in a community that exists nowhere else. Without the track, that ecosystem does not relocate. It dissipates.

The next Liam Lawson might be growing up in Franklin right now. But the track where Lawson discovered what he could do is no longer available to discover it on. Hampton Downs, twenty minutes south, carries some of that weight. But Pukekohe was Pukekohe — local, accessible, woven into the town.

You cannot replicate that by building a newer facility down the road.

Lawson’s career is now measured in Grand Prix starts and world championship points. But careers like his do not begin at the top. They begin at places like Pukekohe Park, in categories like Formula Ford, with families who spend their weekends at the track because that is what they do. Franklin gave motorsport one of its best. The question now is whether it can do it again without the track that made it possible.