Jolyon Palmer has done what most people in the paddock end up doing sooner or later: he’s looked at a Red Bull garage containing Max Verstappen and decided there isn’t a “right” moment to walk into it.
Only a few months ago, Palmer was effectively selling the romance of timing. New regulations for 2026, a reset for everyone, a chance for Red Bull’s latest prospect to arrive while the slate is clean and the pecking order is still being sketched in pencil. In theory, that’s the soft landing.
Now, with nine days of pre-season running in the books — including three behind closed doors — Palmer’s view has hardened into something more familiar. The cars might be new, but the dynamic isn’t. If anything, the early shape of this regulation set appears to be handing Verstappen exactly the kind of platform he tends to turn into a weapon, whether he’s enjoying the experience or not.
And that matters because Isack Hadjar is the next man asked to live with the consequences.
When the 2026 season opens in Melbourne this weekend, Verstappen will be lining up alongside his fourth different team-mate in 16 months. Sergio Perez was moved on at the end of 2024. Liam Lawson started 2025 in the sister car and was replaced after two races by Yuki Tsunoda. Now Hadjar gets the call-up, following a debut season that swung wildly between public pain and genuine breakthrough — from his Melbourne formation-lap crash and the tears that followed, to sharing a Dutch Grand Prix podium with Verstappen.
That trajectory is precisely why the promotion has been greeted warmly in many corners. Hadjar’s clearly got speed, and he’s shown he can recover from setbacks inside the fishbowl. But Palmer’s concern isn’t whether Hadjar belongs at Red Bull. It’s whether any driver can reasonably be expected to arrive and immediately function as a reliable second point of reference next to Verstappen, especially if the new-generation Red Bull leans into the characteristics his team-mates have historically hated.
Palmer’s earlier argument was straightforward: new rules should mean new habits, and a car not inherently sculpted around Verstappen’s preferences. Five months later, he’s publicly accepted that the “starting from zero” idea is a nice story, not necessarily a real one.
On the F1 Nation podcast, Palmer put it bluntly: there’s no good time to be Verstappen’s team-mate.
His reasoning is rooted in what the early 2026 cars seem to be asking of drivers. Palmer pointed to the way energy is being put through the rear axle on deceleration and how that can destabilise the car — the sort of thing that punishes anyone who needs a settled platform before they commit to the corner. Verstappen, by reputation and by evidence, has long been among the best at living on that knife-edge: controlling a lively rear, rotating the car with decisive inputs, and doing it without turning every corner into a slide that kills the tyres.
It’s also the exact area where Verstappen’s previous partners have tended to unravel. The Red Bull has rarely been an easy car to drive to its limit unless you like that sharpness, and unless you can trust what it will do when you trail the brake and ask the rear to help you turn. If 2026’s rules are naturally nudging cars in that direction — and Palmer believes they are — it doesn’t really matter whether Verstappen is complaining about them in interviews. A driver can dislike a trait and still be the best in the field at exploiting it.
From Hadjar’s perspective, that’s the trap: you don’t just need to be quick, you need to be quick in a way that overlaps with Verstappen’s strengths, while also finding a path that doesn’t lead you into the same dead ends others have hit. If the car’s baseline is already comfortable for Verstappen, the pressure on the other side of the garage ramps up immediately, because every deficit looks personal rather than technical.
Testing has only sharpened that sense of looming asymmetry. Hadjar’s mileage was compromised: he crashed in Barcelona’s private running in the wet and then appeared to catch the worst of Red Bull’s reliability issues once the public test moved to Bahrain. Across the period, he completed an unconfirmed 327 laps, while Verstappen logged 546. On headline pace, Verstappen ended with a best of 1:33.109; Hadjar’s 1:34.260 left him more than a second back.
Nobody sensible is declaring form from testing times alone — particularly in a regulation reset where fuel loads and engine modes are a fog even for seasoned observers — but lost running is lost learning, and that’s the part Palmer keeps circling back to. Hadjar hasn’t simply been asked to adapt to a new team and a new generation of car. He’s been asked to do it with a chunk of preparation stolen by incidents and gremlins, while Verstappen has quietly banked laps and, by Palmer’s reading, is already sitting in a car that flatters what he does best.
Red Bull will insist, publicly at least, that this is all manageable. It’s March, not November. But Melbourne has a way of hardening narratives quickly, and Hadjar is walking into a seat where the first difficult weekend doesn’t look like a learning experience — it looks like a verdict.
That’s the backdrop to Palmer’s U-turn. The romance of a regulation reset is that everyone gets a fresh start. The reality is that the greats tend to find themselves faster than everyone else does, and if the early handling traits are indeed playing into Verstappen’s hands, Hadjar’s job description for 2026 is the toughest one in the pit lane: be close enough to the benchmark while the benchmark is being written by the same man who’s made a habit of breaking his team-mates.
