Liam Lawson said Red Bull created a false narrative around the reasons behind his early exit from the team last year and that he now pretends in his mind he "never even went there."
Lawson replaced Sergio Pérez going into 2025 but was dropped after just two races back to the junior team, Racing Bulls, with Yuki Tsunoda moving up.
Red Bull suggested at the time the decision was made to ease pressure on Lawson after an alarming lack of form alongside Max Verstappen, but Lawson rejects that characterisation.
"The whole thing was played out to be me being mentally struggling and all this stuff, and like they were doing it to protect me," he told the High Performance Podcast. "That honestly just could not be further from what it was actually like."
After a tricky opening race in Australia, Lawson had an even more difficult weekend in China -- a venue he had never raced at before. He explained how at the Shanghai event, Red Bull pushed him towards a radical car set-up as they looked to understand a car which at that point of the year was lacking pace -- something Verstappen was vocal about at the time, too.
"We had spoken about basically trying something quite wild on the car to get some comfort for me, but also because at the time collectively we weren't happy at all with the car," he said. "Max wasn't happy. Everyone was like, 'This is not working, and we need to try something quite radical here.'
"And so we all had a meeting on Saturday night, and it was decided, I was on board with it because the idea was 'let's try something quite crazy, but it might help get a direction for Liam and for the team going forward to make this car a bit easier to drive.'
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"We decided, 'OK, let's start from the pitlane and basically radically change a car.' We made a massive change you would never do on a race weekend, like a normal change times 10.
"Trying to get the same balance out of the car, just in a very different way. An easier car to drive, a more stable car to drive. But it's a shot in the dark, and even if it works, the chance of it working over a race was very low. I knew all of these things, but it was proposed to me as, 'This is going to help you for the future, and this is going to give us a bit more direction. We're going to try this. You're starting last in the race, it's done anyway. Let's just try something, and this will help you.'"
The radical changes failed to improve Lawson's competitiveness and his demotion was confirmed ahead of the following week's race, the Japanese Grand Prix.
Tsunoda also struggled to consistently match Verstappen after replacing Lawson. Lawson, meanwhile, has rebuilt his confidence since returning to Racing Bulls and enjoyed a strong run of form this season.
Speaking about how he has done that, he said: "I tried to [not let it affect me] as much as possible, I even pretended it never even happened. I spent two races there, and the way it all went down was just so crazy that I honestly was like, I'm just going to pretend I never even went there."
Lawson's interview appeared to be a dig at how things were done in the previous era of Red Bull -- former team boss Christian Horner and racing advisor Helmut Marko, who for so long oversaw driver decisions together, both left the team later in the year at different points.
Lawson marked out special praise for Verstappen, who he said supported him through the whole saga.
"He is in such a high-level position, such an accomplished position that he's had so much success, it'd be very easy for him to not be like that," Lawson said. "When I went to Red Bull, through all of it, he was very supportive.
"I won't go too much into detail about it, but he was very supportive."
On his own performances across the two Red Bull races, Lawson added: "Let me say, you can always do a better job. So I look at those two races, if I want to reflect on them, and I did at the time, I could have done a better job in some ways.
"But I think just the way we did, really no testing. I did half a day before the season, and even then, our Bahrain testing was very compromised as well. We had some issues, and I just went into the first weekend very unprepared. I just kept telling myself that I'll just deal with it, it'll be fine."
Lawson has finished in the points at five of the seven races so far this year, scoring 28 of Racing Bulls' 41 points.