Liam Lawson's push-up clip: Harmless joke or creepy stunt? Why F1 fans are at war

A man drops to the floor and starts doing push-ups.

That is the whole clip. It lasts a few seconds. It was filmed in what looks like an F1 paddock, outside the blue walls of a team building.

In front of him stands a woman in Red Bull team kit. Behind her, three men watch. One holds a camera. All three are laughing.

The man on the floor wears a blue and white Red Bull shirt. He is Liam Lawson, the New Zealand driver who races for Racing Bulls.

This week an F1 fan account shared the clip with a meme caption on top: "When I run into my ex I'm still not over." The replies soon split into two camps that could not see the same video.

Photo: Unknown (reposted by @belzyboob and Scheconation)

What actually happens in the F1 push-up clip?

Here is only what the clip shows.

The man walks up, drops down and does push-ups on the ground. The woman stands close by and looks down at him. She is wearing a dark team shirt and a short dark skirt or skort. A skort is a pair of shorts with a skirt panel over the front.

The three men stand in a half circle. The photographer has a camera around his neck and another in his hand. Everyone is grinning.

There is no sound in the version that spread. There is no team logo or post on screen. The caption and the watermark of a meme page sit across the middle of the frame. The caption is the only words anyone sees.

That matters more than it looks. The caption was added by a reposter. It tells you the man is embarrassed in front of an ex. Nothing in the clip itself says that.

Who is the man doing push-ups in front of the Red Bull staff member?

The man on the floor is Racing Bulls driver Liam Lawson. Fans spotted him in the replies, and The Big Fuss has confirmed it is him.

What we still do not have is a word from Lawson, Racing Bulls or Red Bull about the clip.

Lawson has had a hard two years in public. Red Bull promoted him to its main team for 2025, then dropped him back to Racing Bulls after two races. He has since rebuilt his name, and F1's own site called him one of the standout drivers of the first half of 2026.

Why do people think the push-up clip is creepy?

The critics were blunt. One wrote: "This was creepy."

Another focused on where his eyes go. "He drops down and then looks, he doesn't even have the decency to look away," that reply said.

Some asked about workplace rules. "Is this okay from a compliance standpoint in F1?" one person wrote. Compliance means the rules a company sets for how staff treat each other.

A fourth reply went further. Even if someone at Red Bull asked him to do it for a funny post, that person said, "he should have said no."

For this group, the problem is simple. A woman at work, in a short uniform, has a man drop to the floor at her feet while other men laugh. Whatever the plan was, they say, she was the punchline.

Why do other fans say it is just a joke?

The defenders read it the other way round.

One reply said the man "did it for the photographer, probably an inside joke." The photographer is right there, camera ready, and laughing.

Another explained the gag. "The joke is that you trip and do push-ups to disguise the fall," that fan wrote. It is an old prank. You stumble, hit the floor and turn it into a workout so nobody sees you fall.

One woman pushed back hard on the critics. She said they were reading far too much into it, and that it was sad the first thought was that a man was trying to look under a woman's skirt.

Others just wrote: "We don't know the context."

What we know and what we don't

Are skirts allowed in the F1 pit lane?

One defender wrote: "It's a skort. Skirts aren't allowed in the pit lane."

We could not find a rule about skorts or skirts. The nearest thing is a rule on long trousers. GPFans reported that F2 stewards fined a team €500 at the Spanish Grand Prix because a team member near the car was not in long trousers during a session.

The clip, though, does not look like a pit lane during a session. It looks like a walkway behind the garages. So the skort point may be true and still not settle anything.

Photo: Yu Chu Chin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Why do F1 fans fight so hard over clips like this?

F1 fans live online. Each driver has a loyal army, and every army has rivals. A clip with no sound and no context becomes a test. People fill the gap with what they already think about the driver, the team and the sport.

If you like him, it is a goofy inside joke with a photographer. If you have watched women in motorsport get sidelined for years, it is one more moment where a woman at work becomes the gag. Both groups watched the same few seconds. That is why neither side can see what the other is going on about.

One short clip with no context has started fights before. Fans argued for days over whether a famous face was really Megan Fox, and that row ran on the same fuel. For a softer side of sport going viral, there is Messi in tears on the team bus.

So what is this clip really?

Take away the caption and look again.

A man on the floor. A woman looking down. A photographer and two friends laughing. No sound, no date, no name on screen.

Put the words "my ex" on top, and it becomes a story about heartbreak. Post it to people angry about how women are treated, and it becomes a story about that. Post it to his fans, and it is a prank.

The only words in the whole clip were typed by someone who was not there. Everything the internet is fighting about came after that.