Isack Hadjar arrived at Red Bull Racing with the usual rookie energy — keen to learn, keen to impress — but he’ll admit there was one part of the 2026 package he didn’t trust until he’d felt it for himself.
Red Bull Powertrains is living the sport’s most public engineering experiment: building its own F1 power unit for the first time, in a new rules cycle, with Ford as its partner. For a driver stepping into the main team just as the ground shifts under everyone’s feet, it’s not the sort of thing you take on faith.
Hadjar didn’t.
He’s been open about the mood around the project late last year, when the whispers got louder and the confidence sounded less absolute than Red Bull would’ve liked. Christian Horner, still team boss at the time, publicly insisted it would be “embarrassing” for the established manufacturers if Red Bull’s newcomer unit turned out better. His successor Laurent Mekies struck a more cautious note, effectively warning against assuming Red Bull could immediately stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Mercedes and Ferrari from day one.
That caution didn’t come from nowhere. Hadjar says even within the team, the internal read wasn’t universally upbeat as 2025 wound down.
Then the cars ran.
Across pre-season testing in Bahrain, Red Bull Powertrains has been one of the paddock’s big talking points — not because it survived, but because it looked sharp. Toto Wolff went further, suggesting the Red Bull was as much as a second per lap quicker on the straights alone during the first test in Sakhir. Carlos Sainz, now at Williams, echoed the sense that Red Bull’s unit had made an early statement, calling it “a clear step ahead of anyone else” in the opening phases.
Hadjar’s own turning point came earlier, at the January shakedown in Barcelona — the first time he could stop listening to the noise and start building a feel for the thing that actually matters: whether it will run, lap after lap, without making the cockpit feel like a waiting room for a retirement.
“It’s way beyond what I anticipated,” Hadjar said. “I think the impression last year, towards the end of the season, they were not very positive. The rumors, even within the team, they were not completely satisfied.
“And in [the] Barcelona [shakedown in January], day one, I think I did 110 laps straight away, so I was very – in a positive way – surprised. For a team that started the project three years ago, it’s very impressive.”
Those laps matter more than any paddock line, because this isn’t just about headline speed in testing. 2026 is going to be an endurance contest of systems integration: new power unit architecture, new operational habits, new failure modes that don’t show up until you’ve done the boring mileage and heat-soaked everything.
Hadjar’s most telling comment wasn’t about performance at all — it was about doubt, and how quickly it evaporated once the car started doing what it was supposed to.
“Honestly, in Barcelona I had many, many doubts and they cleared very quickly,” he said. “Of course, I still expect us to have issues during the season. It’s normal, but a lot less than what I thought.”
That’s a notably human admission from a driver stepping into the most scrutinised seat on the grid. Red Bull’s internal expectation-setting has been a tightrope: proud enough to project strength, realistic enough to avoid over-promising on a first-time power unit programme. Hadjar’s take lands somewhere in the middle — impressed, a little relieved, but not naïve.
There is, though, one number from Bahrain that complicates the neat storyline. Red Bull didn’t leave Sakhir as the mileage king. Across the six official days of testing, it logged 672 laps — third-fewest in the field, with only Cadillac (568) and Aston Martin (334) completing fewer. World champions McLaren topped the table with 817, the kind of volume that lets you sleep a touch better on the flight to Melbourne.
On paper, reduced running invites the usual questions. Reliability? Hidden issues? A change of plan? Testing programmes can be misleading, of course: teams stop early when they’ve got what they came for, and they lose time for reasons that aren’t always dramatic. But in a season where the power unit is the story as much as the car, you can’t blame rivals for watching Red Bull’s lap count as closely as its straight-line speed.
Still, if the early read from the paddock is even broadly accurate — that the RBPT unit isn’t merely “fine” but potentially an early benchmark — the implications run beyond one winter test. A competitive Red Bull power unit doesn’t just protect Verstappen’s title ambitions or stabilise a transition of team leadership; it reshapes the competitive landscape of the first year of a new formula. For everyone else, the nightmare scenario isn’t Red Bull being quick in Bahrain. It’s Red Bull being quick *and* having headroom.
Hadjar, for his part, sounds like someone who’s felt the weight lift slightly off his shoulders. Not because he believes Red Bull will sail through 2026 without headaches — he explicitly doesn’t — but because he’s now dealing with the normal level of uncertainty that comes with a new era, rather than the kind that creeps in when you suspect the foundations might not be set.
In a winter full of rumours, that’s as close as you get to a meaningful verdict: the doubts were real, and the car has done enough running — and shown enough — to quiet them down. For now.
