Fifteen-year-old wins CareVets Scholarship for coming Toyota 86 Championship

| Photographer Credit: Mark Whittaker

Pukekohe student Liam Lawson will be the CareVets Racing Team’s scholarship driver in the coming 2017-2018 Toyota 86 Championship.

“It’s a real honour to be chosen, the scholarship has been a fast tracvk for the drivers chosen in past seasons and I’m looking forward to racing in a two-car professionally run team like this,” he said.

He will drive the series alongside CareVets’ 2016-0217 scholarship winner and series rookie of the year Jack Milligan, Christchurch.

Though he is just 15 years old, Lawson is a young man in a hurry. He is currently second overall in the Australian Formula 4 Championship with two rounds remaining and won the 2016-2017 Formula 1600 championship. Still a student at Pukekohe High School, he stepped up from karting with a string of race, event and championship wins to his name and moved into Formula First in 2015 then to winning pace in Formula Ford a year later.

In the scholarship test day at Hampton Downs on Monday of this week, Lawson was up against nine other hopeful racers. He had his sights set on winning the drive from the first test – but struck an early setback on the day.

The CareVets Racing Scholarship is unique in New Zealand motor racing and in 2016 2017 its drivers delivered the team the Toyota 86 Championship title for Christchurch driver Ryan Yardley and also the Rookie of the Year win for that season’s scholarship driver Jack Milligan, also of Christchurch.

Mark Baker has been working in automotive PR and communications for more than two decades. For much longer than that he has been a motorsport journalist, photographer and competitor, witness to most of the most exciting and significant motorsport trends and events of the mid-late 20th Century. His earliest memories of motorsport were trips to races at Ohakea in the early 1960s, and later of annual summer pilgrimages to watch Shellsport racers and Mini 7s at Bay Park and winter sorties into forests around Kawerau and Rotorua to see the likes of Russell Brookes, Ari Vatanen and Mike Marshall ply their trade in group 4 Escorts. Together with Murray Taylor and TV producer/director Dave Hedge he has been responsible for helping to build New Zealand’s unique Toyota Racing Series into a globally recognized event brand under category managers Barrie and Louise Thomlinson. Now working for a variety of automotive and mainstream commercial clients, Mark has a unique perspective on recent motor racing history and the future career paths of our best and brightest young racers.

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