Marko talks up Hadjar as Verstappen-ready — but Red Bull keeps 2026 door ajar for a “super talent”
Isack Hadjar’s Zandvoort surge didn’t just light up a grandstand, it blew the 2026 Red Bull conversation wide open. The 20-year-old Racing Bulls rookie landed his first Formula 1 podium at the Dutch Grand Prix, holding firm in a pressure cooker, and promptly earned the kind of endorsement from Helmut Marko that turns a prospect into a candidate.
“He certainly has the mental strength to hold his own against Verstappen,” Red Bull’s motorsport advisor told Kleine Zeitung, a line that felt less like flattery and more like a job reference. Marko’s long been a connoisseur of steel-nerved juniors; this one, he says, doesn’t moan about the machinery, makes few errors, and figures tracks out frighteningly fast.
That doesn’t mean the seat next to Max is Hadjar’s by default. Red Bull won’t rush a call and, crucially, won’t limit itself to its own academy if someone extraordinary knocks. As Marko put it: “We want to stick to our driver pool for 2026. Of course, if a super talent comes along, we won’t look away.”
Hadjar’s case writes itself after Zandvoort. He qualified up the road from some very big names, sat calmly in Verstappen’s wheel tracks off the start, and then made a hard race look simple against Charles Leclerc and George Russell as strategy and attrition played out around him. Lando Norris’ late engine failure opened the door, but Hadjar had already done the heavy lifting. The Frenchman left with a maiden F1 trophy and a proper bump up the standings — not bad for a driver who began 2025 as a curiosity and now looks like the sharp end of Red Bull’s future.
The political weather is shifting, too. Yuki Tsunoda finally snapped a barren run for Racing Bulls with points on the same day, but it was Hadjar who stole the oxygen. Liam Lawson remains in the frame. And further down the ladder, Arvid Lindblad’s Formula 2 form has nudged him into the conversation for a Racing Bulls seat. The pipeline is full; choosing who sits where is the hard part.
Timing, as ever with Red Bull, is calculated. Don’t expect declarations tomorrow. “It’s nine races to go,” Racing Bulls team principal Laurent Mekies said in Zandvoort when asked about 2026. “I’m not telling you that we’ll wait until the last race, because also there is a dynamic by which you want to let your driver know. But we have time.” Marko has similarly indicated decisions aren’t likely before October at the earliest.
Behind the scenes, the criteria haven’t changed. Red Bull needs more than speed next to Verstappen — it needs durability, someone who can live with the weekly yardstick without burning out or lighting fires in the garage. That’s why Marko’s “mental strength” line about Hadjar matters. Plenty of talented drivers wilt in the Red Bull pressure cooker; fewer thrive when Max is casually dropping pole laps that look like CGI.
Hadjar looks like he might be one of the latter. He’s quick, tidy, unflappable on the radio, and his racecraft at Zandvoort had the kind of crisp edges you associate with drivers who stick around. If he keeps delivering through the flyaways, he makes the safest kind of argument — the one on the stopwatch.
Still, Red Bull being Red Bull, there’s always a wildcard clause. If a star from outside the program becomes available — the “super talent” Marko alluded to — they’ll take the meeting. They always do. That’s not a snub to the academy so much as a reminder that the Verstappen seat is the most unforgiving vacancy in modern F1, and the team’s threshold for that cockpit is higher than for any other.
For now, the momentum — and the noise — sits with the kid in navy blue. Hadjar has turned intrigue into inevitability in a matter of months. If the past fortnight was his introduction as a serious Red Bull option, the next stretch will decide whether he’s the option.
Red Bull will watch, wait, and measure. Hadjar will keep his head down and race. And somewhere in the middle of all that, the 2026 picture will snap into focus with the click of a pen — just not yet.
