Isack Hadjar didn’t try to dress it up in Miami. The rookie’s first season at Red Bull Racing has already had its share of sharp edges, but this one cut deep: a race-ending clip of the inside barrier at the Turns 14/15 chicane that snapped the steering arm and sent him skating helplessly into the wall on the way out.
“It’s p*ssing me off a lot,” Hadjar admitted afterwards, the frustration still raw. And you could see it in the cockpit in the seconds after impact, too — the kind of steering-wheel thump that isn’t theatre so much as a driver trying to empty their head of what they’ve just thrown away.
The irony is that the crash itself wasn’t the start of the story. Hadjar’s Sunday was already compromised by Saturday’s disqualification from the qualifying results after Red Bull’s floor was deemed too wide, forcing him into a pit-lane start. So any hope of salvaging points required a calm, clean climb through the pack and the sort of precise judgement that Miami’s stop-start rhythm punishes when it’s even a fraction off.
Hadjar felt he had that judgement — right up until he didn’t.
“I finally found the limit,” he said. “All weekend, I was very close and under control, but I made a mistake. This is a tough one. Breaking the car is p*ssing me off a lot. Also, I could have scored good points considering the car I had and I just threw it all away.”
The detail that matters is in how quickly it unraveled. He didn’t have a neat, frame-by-frame recollection of the moment, because there wasn’t time for one. “I can’t really remember because it went by very quickly… It just felt like a big hit. I just didn’t see it coming at all. Then the car was broken, I went in the other wall, couldn’t stop it.”
That’s Miami. Get it wrong by a whisker and you don’t just lose a tenth — you lose the steering, the race, and a good chunk of confidence you’ve been building since Friday.
What will sting Red Bull is that there were signs the weekend could’ve been an inflection point, even with the self-inflicted qualifying wound. Hadjar was running 15th when he binned it, and he insisted the opening stint hinted at far more than that. Starting on the hard tyre hadn’t left him feeling on edge; if anything, he said it had made the first phase of the race feel straightforward.
“I honestly felt awesome in those first few laps,” he explained. “It was very easy for me to overtake. [Arvid] Lindblad was the last car I took, aside from the pits. We did just three laps of racing, so I think very good pace. To me, it was feeling fine.”
For a driver still learning what “Red Bull weekend” really means — the scrutiny, the expectations, the internal comparisons that never stop even when everyone swears they do — Miami was the sort of double-hit that can either bruise you or harden you. Hadjar’s language suggested he’s taking it personally, but not catastrophising it. He was seen talking with the pit wall as the race played out, and when asked whether that support helps him reset after a mistake, he didn’t spin it into a one-way apology tour.
Instead, he widened the blame. “The team and I made mistakes this weekend,” he said. “It’s been honestly a bit of a disaster from both our sides, so we need to stick together and see what we can do the next weekend.”
That matters, because Miami wasn’t only a driver error story; it was also a weekend where Red Bull believed it had nudged its technical direction forward. Hadjar pointed to upgrades brought to Florida — including a Ferrari-style rotating rear wing — and, crucially, suggested the car is becoming less of a knife-edge proposition over a single lap.
“Obviously we’re happy. There’s more performance in the car,” he said. “It’s not such a pain now to make it to Q3, which it was the first few rounds. Let’s just look at the positives. We come back in Canada and hopefully we do a strong one.”
That’s the tightrope for a rookie at the front end of the grid: you need to show you’re quick enough to justify the seat, while also proving you can bank results when the weekend gets messy. Hadjar had the speed in Miami — he sounded sure of it — but a pit-lane start, three laps of overtaking promise and then a broken car is the sort of Sunday that leaves your statistics looking worse than your actual performance.
He knows it, too. There was no hiding behind “experience” or “learning” in his answers, just that nagging, almost physical impatience that tends to follow a costly error.
“Honestly I’m itching to get back to it right now,” he said. “I wish I was driving. I wish I knew what I could have done [in this race]. It was a good start. So now having to wait three weeks is a bit rough.”
In other words: the worst part isn’t the crash, or even the points that got away. It’s the empty time afterwards — when a driver who thinks he’s found the pace has to sit with the feeling that he’d finally got the weekend moving in the right direction, only to end it with one small misjudgement and a very big bill.
