Isack Hadjar is going to get a proper Spa baptism on Sunday: Red Bull is fitting fresh power unit components to his car and the Frenchman says he’s bracing for a back-of-the-grid start in Belgium.
Speaking to Canal+ ahead of the weekend, Hadjar didn’t try to dress it up as anything other than damage limitation on Saturday and an exercise in opportunism on Sunday.
“The goal will be to focus on race pace,” he said. “We know that it will be less focused on performance in qualifying. We will probably start in 22nd. But this is a circuit where it is possible to overtake. Many things can happen. We have a good pace, so I hope to have a lot of fun on Sunday.”
Hadjar’s situation is the sharp end of the trade-off that’s defined this new power unit era so far: plenty of promise, but not always enough mileage. Red Bull’s first unit under the Red Bull Powertrains banner has clearly landed with real performance — the internal combustion engine even topped the FIA’s first ADUO (Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities) assessment — yet the story across the paddock is that speed has arrived quicker than bulletproof reliability.
For Hadjar, that’s not theoretical. He was out of the season opener in Australia with a power unit failure, and more trouble later in the year cost him what would have been a Monaco podium. Nine races into the campaign, the arithmetic had stopped being negotiable: he’d already been burning through parts and was on the cusp of penalties, having moved onto his fourth Energy Store and fourth Control Electronics. With race 10 arriving at a track where you can at least *use* a grid drop, Red Bull has decided to take the hit now rather than let it drip-feed smaller compromises over multiple rounds.
Spa is also the place where “start last, finish somewhere respectable” is more than just paddock bravado. The lap’s long, the DRS zones do their job, and strategy can swing hard if the race fractures — which it often does. Hadjar is essentially betting that a car with decent underlying pace can salvage a weekend even if Saturday is written off.
He won’t be the only one trying to turn a penalty into an advantage. McLaren has already confirmed Lando Norris will take a 10-place grid drop after opting to fit a new power electronics unit, moving onto his fourth of the season.
In McLaren’s words, Mercedes-AMG High Performance Powertrains has introduced “a series of reliability fixes” to its new power electronics systems, and the only way Norris can benefit immediately is to accept the sporting penalty that comes with adding another unit to the pool. The team’s logic is straightforward: Spa offers more overtaking than the next two stops on the calendar — Hungary and Zandvoort — so if you’re going to pay the price, you may as well do it at a circuit that gives you a chance of earning some of it back.
McLaren also made clear it expects this fourth unit to carry Norris through the remainder of the season, trying to draw a line under the issue: maximise reliability now, minimise further penalties later.
Taken together, it sets up a Belgian Grand Prix with a slightly skewed competitive picture before a wheel has even turned in qualifying. If a couple of quick cars are being injected into the midfield pack on Sunday, it tends to create the sort of chain reaction that makes Spa compelling: alternate strategies suddenly look braver, undercut windows open up in places they normally don’t, and anyone starting near the front has to manage not just the usual tyre-and-traffic equations but the looming presence of cars that “shouldn’t” be back there.
For Hadjar in particular, the weekend becomes less about one-lap perfection and more about keeping his head clear when the race starts to get messy — picking off the right cars at the right moments, avoiding the kind of early damage that turns a recovery drive into a long afternoon, and trusting that the fresh hardware will do what it’s there to do.
He sounded pretty relaxed about the prospect, which is either admirable or a sign he already knows Spa rarely asks permission before it changes the script. Either way, starting 22nd at a track like this isn’t the end of the weekend. It’s just a different kind of assignment.
