Isack Hadjar is living Red Bull’s waiting game — and he’s fine with it
Two Racing Bulls in the points at Interlagos tends to sharpen the conversation. Isack Hadjar and Liam Lawson delivered exactly that in São Paulo, a tidy double-score that nudged the Faenza crew’s form line up at just the right time of year — the time when Red Bull decisions start bouncing around the paddock walls.
Hadjar, who’s been linked more than once to the big seat alongside Max Verstappen for 2026, isn’t twisting himself up over it. This is Red Bull, after all. They take their time, they keep everyone honest, and they rarely blink before the final flyaways.
“I’ve never really had something signed early in my career,” he said after Interlagos, relaxed in that particular way drivers get when the car has done what it was supposed to. “You put your head down and work until the last lap of the last race. That’s how this programme operates.”
Racing Bulls boss Laurent Mekies has already signposted that the wider Red Bull and junior team line-ups will be clarified towards the end of the campaign. Between now and then, every lap is evidence. Hadjar and Lawson are making theirs count.
What makes this round of musical chairs trickier is the timing. Next season is 2026 — the sport’s reset year. New power units, a fresh chassis philosophy, slimmer cars and smaller tyres. All the buzzwords, plus a learning curve you can see from orbit. In that context, continuity has value. Jumping ships or scaling up roles just as the rulebook flips isn’t for the faint-hearted.
Hadjar isn’t naïve about that. He admits that carrying over the current spec would make any step up easier. But compared to where he was 12 months ago, he’s now settled in the F1 paddock, knows the system, knows the people, and that matters. “It’ll be tough for everyone — even the experienced guys,” he said. “But it’s not a rookie reset. Different challenge.”
Around him, the usual Red Bull ecosystem hums. Lawson is doing the sensible thing: scoring when the car allows and keeping the feedback clean. Yuki Tsunoda’s name still circles the conversation. And then there’s Arvid Lindblad, the academy comet whose trajectory keeps popping up in the same sentences as “promotion” and “soon.” The pipeline is busy; the margin for error is thin.
From a team perspective, the Brazilian weekend felt timely. Racing Bulls have been streaky this year, but Interlagos is not a track you fluke. It’s a driver circuit that rewards rhythm, tyre touch and proper racecraft. Both drivers came out of it with receipts. That’s useful when decisions drift upward to Milton Keynes and beyond.
Hadjar’s biggest strength right now? He looks unbothered. There’s an ease to the way he’s going about it — a calm aggression on Sundays and, crucially, fewer rough edges than you’d expect at this stage. That doesn’t guarantee anything in the Red Bull universe, where the bar is relentlessly high, but it keeps him in the conversation, where you need to be when the music stops.
The rest is out of his hands, which is the point. The Red Bull system has always valued drivers who thrive under delayed certainty, who perform without the soft cushion of a long-term guarantee. Some get claustrophobic. Others grow sharper. Hadjar, for now, looks like the latter.
So the plan is simple: keep stacking points, keep avoiding headlines for the wrong reasons, and make the question as difficult as possible for the people paid to answer it. The calendar still has enough mileage left for momentum to matter.
Interlagos was a step. The next one needs to be bigger. The decision will arrive when it arrives — it usually does around here — and Hadjar sounds like a man who’s prepared for either door to open. That’s not resignation. It’s someone who understands the rules of the room.
