Isack Hadjar’s first proper wobble in a Red Bull didn’t happen in front of grandstands or a live timing screen. It happened behind closed doors in Barcelona in January, in that awkward, low-stakes shakedown space where the only people watching are the ones with cameras — and the ones on social media waiting to turn a snapshot into a verdict.
He found the barriers at the exit of the fast final corner at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya after switching from wet to intermediate tyres, a detail both driver and team were keen to point out afterwards. Red Bull stayed measured, too. Team principal Laurent Mekies called it “very unfortunate… but it’s part of the game”, while also stressing the early positives Hadjar had shown since stepping up from Racing Bulls.
Hadjar’s own method of processing it was… modern.
“When I crashed, I thought about – directly, I thought about Pierre [Gasly],” he said in Bahrain this week. “So I went on Twitter [X] and I read everything, and I was like, ‘ah, I’m screwed for the whole season.’ And that’s how I moved on, honestly.”
It was a joke, but it landed because it’s grounded in something every driver now has to manage: the speed at which a single moment gets filed as a personality trait. A crash in testing used to be an internal embarrassment and a debrief. Now it’s a trending topic with a ready-made narrative — especially if you’re stepping into the second Red Bull seat, the most unforgiving job description on the grid.
The irony is that, in terms of the work that actually matters, Hadjar’s week has been far more useful than that Barcelona clip. In official testing in Bahrain, the 21-year-old logged 146 laps — around two-and-a-half Grand Prix distances — as he starts the real task: learning how to extract performance from a car built around a team-mate who’s effectively been fused to Red Bull’s ecosystem for a decade.
Hadjar isn’t pretending that part is going to be painless, either. He’s already been candid about expecting to be slower than Max Verstappen early on, acknowledging the obvious: you don’t stroll into a team with a four-time world champion and immediately own the reference points. The more interesting piece is how he frames the adaptation — not as a crisis, but as the job.
Asked directly whether the car suits his driving style, he didn’t offer the kind of rehearsed reassurance rookies usually reach for.
“So far, it’s definitely not,” Hadjar said. “It was day one for me, first afternoon, so if it was hooked up for me already, then I’m done for the season. But it’s not, so that’s why we’re working. From now to Abu Dhabi, the car is going to gain so much lap time anyway.”
That’s a driver talking like someone who understands the Red Bull reality: the car won’t be brought to you; you’ll be brought to it. It’s also a small but telling sign that Hadjar’s confidence isn’t the loud, brittle kind — it’s the practical sort that comes from assuming you’ll have to earn it.
And for all the gallows humour about being “screwed” after a testing shunt, he’s not short on ambition. Hadjar already has a first Formula 1 podium to his name from Zandvoort last season, and he’s arrived at Red Bull with targets that go beyond simply surviving comparisons to Verstappen.
“I think obviously, like that first race win is in the radar. That would be great,” he said. “I’d like to see our car progressing faster than the other teams. I think that would be also very enjoyable.”
There’s a neat tension there. On one hand, he’s realistic about the early deficit to Verstappen and the time it takes to tune yourself to Red Bull’s sharpest edges. On the other, he’s speaking like someone who expects to be in the fight — and who doesn’t see “second seat at Red Bull” as a sentence, but as an opportunity.
The Barcelona incident will resurface, because everything does. It’ll be clipped into montages the next time he has a messy weekend, dragged out as “evidence” by people who weren’t in the room when the tyre call was made, or when the car snapped. That’s just part of the theatre now.
What matters more is what comes next: how quickly he turns those 146 Bahrain laps into a language he can speak under pressure, how he handles a car that doesn’t naturally flatter him, and how he manages the week-to-week noise that comes with being Verstappen’s team-mate.
Hadjar’s already found one coping mechanism: laugh at the overreaction until it loses its power. In 2026, that might not be a bad skill to have.
