Helmut Marko hints at Hadjar timing as Red Bull weighs next move
Helmut Marko isn’t exactly famous for patience, but on Isack Hadjar, Red Bull’s motorsport advisor is playing the long game.
Hadjar’s rookie campaign with Racing Bulls has turned a lot of heads — not least with that sharp podium at Zandvoort — and he’s now the name most often paired with Max Verstappen for the senior Red Bull seat. The only question left hanging in the paddock is when, not if.
There’s been chatter about a swift swap before the end of this season, with Yuki Tsunoda shuttling back to Faenza and Hadjar stepping up early. Red Bull’s driver structure makes that kind of mid-year shuffle easy enough; their drivers are contracted centrally and moved between Red Bull Racing and Racing Bulls as needed. We’ve already seen how quickly the team can pivot when a seat isn’t quite working.
But Marko suggested the smartest window might be the big reset: 2026.
“These ground-effect cars are very particular and with the new regulations it’s going to be a different kind of driving,” he said when asked if the regulations shake-up offers the ideal moment. “You have to use a lot of your brain for the recovery system. So I think it’s a good time for a move.”
Read between the lines and you get the sense Red Bull prefers dropping Hadjar into a fresh rules cycle rather than parachuting him into a title fight midstream. That suits their rhythm: bed him in at Racing Bulls, let the confidence base layer set, then hand him the keys when the entire field is relearning the playbook.
Still, nothing’s signed and sealed. Some in the paddock insist Hadjar’s promotion is a done deal, others say Red Bull’s still weighing its options — hardly a surprise in Silly Season’s noisiest year. Marko’s public line stays measured.
“He’s still learning,” Marko added. “He has a very good relationship with his engineer — he’s also French, so that helps — but it just has to keep going and developing like he is.”
The other moving parts are familiar. Tsunoda, for all his growth and flashes of speed, is widely tipped to follow Honda to Aston Martin in 2026. That opens up a path for Red Bull to promote from within on both sides of the garage: Hadjar up to the senior team, and another junior — Arvid Lindblad is the name most often whispered — stepping into Racing Bulls to keep the pipeline flowing.
None of this diminishes the scale of what Hadjar’s done this year. Red Bull’s academy has produced stars and also swallowed a few careers along the way; to show up as a rookie, nail a podium, and look increasingly at ease on Sunday afternoons is exactly how you force the issue in Milton Keynes. It hasn’t hurt that he’s forged a tidy connection with his race engineer either. Process, feedback, execution — it’s the kind of grown-up approach that wins you advocates on the pit wall.
The caution flag for an immediate leap remains straightforward: the current Red Bull is a race-winning tool in Verstappen’s hands and a tricky beast for anyone still rounding off the edges. If you’re Marko, why risk disrupting a title campaign now when the 2026 cars and power units will ask everyone to adapt from scratch? Bring Hadjar in when the slate is clean and let his learning curve blend into everyone else’s.
Of course, this is Red Bull. If the dominoes fall earlier — if an opportunity or a need presents itself — they’ve never been shy about making the call on a Monday and flying a driver into a different garage by Friday. That’s the advantage of owning four seats and running a program built to move on instinct.
For now, Hadjar’s job is simple: keep stacking clean weekends, keep the noise positive, and make the decision inevitable. Red Bull will do Red Bull things. But timing is everything, and Marko’s made it pretty clear he knows exactly when the window looks widest.
