Isack Hadjar isn’t selling a fairytale. He’s selling reality.
The Racing Bulls rookie, confirmed to step up to Red Bull Racing in 2026, says he’s already made peace with what awaits when he lands alongside Max Verstappen. In short: the three-time champion will beat him at first. Easily.
“I’m going to be slower at the start,” Hadjar admitted ahead of Abu Dhabi, setting a tone you rarely hear from drivers on the brink of a career-changing promotion. No chest-puffing, no soundbites about taking the fight to the yardstick of a generation. Just a calm, almost clinical acceptance of the challenge he’s invited.
That alone is notable in Milton Keynes world. The second Red Bull seat is the sport’s most glamorous pressure cooker, a throne room with a trapdoor. We’ve seen big talents singe their wings trying to match Verstappen’s tempo, from Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon to Sergio Perez. Liam Lawson impressed in cameo duty. Yuki Tsunoda, who earns the demotion Hadjar’s promotion triggers for 2026, has flashed the speed but not the season-long consistency Red Bull craves.
Hadjar, by contrast, is choosing to disarm the hype before it becomes a weight. He’s even mapped out the first month: he expects to get outpaced, expects to stare at lap traces that don’t make sense yet, expects that it’ll sting. Then he plans to build.
“Go in believing you’re special and you get stomped,” he said bluntly. “If you accept the gap, you prepare better. Then you work towards it.” It’s equal parts humility and strategy — and it sounds exactly like a driver who’s spent a season learning to separate noise from progress.
It’s been a long road to this point. A year ago, Hadjar was fighting Gabriel Bortoleto for the F2 title and didn’t have an F1 seat in his pocket. His debut in Australia was a minor disaster — a formation-lap crash and a sharper-than-ideal word from Helmut Marko. But the 20-year-old reset. He turned the rest of 2025 into a steady climb with Racing Bulls: points as a habit, a breakthrough podium, and the kind of unflustered race craft that makes team bosses circle names on whiteboards.
For all the emotion around his rise, Hadjar’s definition of “arrival” is telling. Signing the Red Bull contract? Not an achievement. Delivering in the car is. “The achievement is living up to expectations,” he said. It’s the kind of line that reads like PR training until you hear the context — the kid who’s already talking about process, not medals.
There’s also a family thread to this story. He’s spoken about the moment hitting home for his parents, about the mix of surreal and completely normal that comes with chasing the only thing he’s ever really done: drive quickly, think clearly, and repeat.
Red Bull, for its part, gets a driver who knows what he’s walking into. The Verstappen effect has broken plenty of confident minds. Hadjar’s thesis is that embracing the gap might be the best way to close it. No illusions about equality on Day 1, no fuel for the snowball when the stopwatch bites.
What that looks like over 24 races is the real intrigue. Verstappen sets the standard; he also sets the weather. Hadjar’s first task won’t be to beat him — it’ll be to survive him. Keep the delta small, keep the Sunday damage smaller, keep the development trending the right way. It’s not sexy, but it’s how you turn “inevitably slower” into “occasionally equal” into “actually dangerous.”
There’s collateral here too. Tsunoda, pushed into reserve duties for 2026, has every right to be angry. He’s done plenty to keep the Red Bull family honest, and this call is a reminder of the ruthlessness that still runs through the program. Hadjar knows that ruthlessness is now aimed at him. The main-team seat comes with zero shelter.
That’s why his tone matters. Confidence without bravado. Joy without delusion. If Red Bull’s second seat has a survival guide, it starts with exactly this mindset.
Hadjar says he’s ready. Not to dethrone Verstappen — not yet, and maybe not ever — but to take the hard road properly. For a team that’s burned through belief before, that might be the most valuable upgrade of all.
