Red Bull’s new era began in the least dramatic way possible: a car rolling out at Barcelona, clicking through its programme, and coming back in one piece.
Isack Hadjar was handed the first proper taste of the RB22 on Monday as Red Bull opened its 2026 running, and he sounded almost caught off guard by how straightforward the day turned out to be. With the team debuting its first in-house power unit alongside a completely reshaped rule set, you’d normally pencil in a few teething issues as the cost of doing business. Instead, the headline from the cockpit was simple — it worked.
“It was pretty productive,” Hadjar said after stepping out. “Surprisingly, we managed to do a lot more laps than we expected. Everything went pretty smooth. We had, like, only minor issues so it’s, it’s quite impressive considering our first day with our own engine. So it was definitely smooth.”
In the paddock, the first day of a new cycle is rarely about chasing the perfect lap time. It’s about confirming the basics: temperatures under control, systems behaving, no mysterious gremlins that chew up half a session. On that front, Hadjar’s description reads like the kind of report engineers love — not because it’s glamorous, but because it gives them permission to move on to the next layer of work.
What’s interesting is how quickly the conversation moved from “did it run?” to “how does it feel?” Hadjar is only entering his second season in Formula 1, yet he’s already having to recalibrate his driving around the 2026 machinery. His first impressions were that the new cars ask less of the tyres and platform in the corners and, crucially, feel more manageable at the limit.
“It’s definitely a lot, lot less load in general,” he said. “It’s a bit more predictable compared to the previous generation of cars.”
That predictability matters. When cars carry less overall load, you’re often trading some of the glued-down confidence for something a bit livelier — the sort of behaviour that can punish overcommitment. Hadjar’s take suggests Red Bull’s baseline is stable enough that he can already focus on exploiting the new variables rather than simply surviving them.
He also hinted at where the driver’s workload has shifted: the power unit side. The 2026 packages have opened up fresh operational choices, and Hadjar sounded genuinely engaged by the amount he could influence from behind the wheel.
“They’re more simple. It’s easier to play around with them, and also on the PU side, there’s a lot more options for the driver to play with,” he explained. “So I already started to work on it today. So that was very interesting.”
There’s a subtle but important undertone there. “More options” can mean performance opportunity — but it can also mean more ways to get yourself in trouble if you’re not across the details. For a young driver, being switched on to that complexity early in the programme is exactly what the team wants to hear. The speed will come later; the understanding has to arrive first.
Hadjar’s feedback on basic drivability was similarly upbeat, particularly around the areas that usually betray a new car and a new power unit: gearshifts and the transitional phases.
“Honestly, [the driveability is] pretty decent for the first day. It doesn’t feel too far off what I’m used to, at least on my first season, on all the upshifts, downshifts, that was okay,” he said. “So we still have a few things to tweak around, of course, but it’s solid.”
That last word is doing a lot of work. No driver comes out of day one declaring the car “perfect” — and anyone who does is either lying or hasn’t found the problem yet. But “solid” is the kind of status that lets a team spend the next days chasing performance rather than firefighting reliability or calibration headaches. For a first outing with a home-built engine, it’s the kind of start that builds confidence internally, even if nobody at Milton Keynes will say it too loudly in public.
Hadjar finished by framing it as a small payoff for the winter effort, while acknowledging the real work is only beginning.
“I couldn’t have prepared the year better,” he said. “So I’m happy to have at least a very good first day to pay that off but we are definitely not done with the work.”
That’s the correct mindset for the opening of 2026. The grid has been reset, everyone is learning, and the early winners are often the teams that simply rack up clean mileage while others lose hours to preventable problems. Red Bull has started on that side of the ledger — and, for once, the big talking point wasn’t a lap time or a bold claim. It was the quiet relief of a new engine doing what it’s meant to do: run.
