Martin Brundle’s simple message for Isack Hadjar: keep your head down, hit your marks, and the rest will follow
If you’re trying to chart the chaos of a rookie season, Isack Hadjar has kindly provided the template. He arrived in Melbourne with the weight of expectation and left in tears before the lights even went out, skating off in the wet on the formation lap. Fast forward to Zandvoort, and the French-Algerian kid was on the podium. Same season, same car, completely different story.
That’s exactly the point, says Martin Brundle. The former F1 racer turned Sky Sports linchpin has seen enough careers flick from disaster to deliverance to know how thin the margins are, and how quickly they can swing. Earlier this year, Brundle told a struggling youngster something so basic it borders on cliché—then watched it work.
The gist? Treat the job for what it is. A straight, a right, a left. Then another straight. Cut out the noise, trust the process. Weather the squall, because hero-to-zero—and back again—happens faster in this business than anywhere else.
Hadjar’s season is living proof. He took the hit in Australia, kept his head down through the spring, and then cashed in when it mattered. A mature, measured drive at Zandvoort put him on the rostrum and dragged his campaign into sharper focus. It also shoved him into the conversation that swallows so many promising careers: when do you make the jump to Red Bull Racing?
Nico Rosberg, watching the ebb and flow play out from the Sky Sports set, didn’t sugarcoat the stakes. He pointed out how hard the Red Bull ecosystem can be on its youngsters when they stumble—Helmut Marko is rarely one for soft landings—and how seductive the call-up can sound when form spikes. But the second seat alongside Max Verstappen remains the most unforgiving chair in the room. History’s there in black and white: very quick drivers have sat in it, and several have been spat out.
That’s not a knock on Hadjar’s ceiling—if anything, it’s the opposite. Rosberg reckons there’s race-winning potential in the RB driver, and it’s hard to disagree when you look beyond the headline moments and into the body of work. He’s shown pace in traffic, touch in mixed conditions, composure at restarts. The rough edges are obvious—rookie edges always are—but the tools are real.
Which leaves the question that tends to define Red Bull’s young guns: timing. Say yes too early and you can get swallowed by the Verstappen vortex, all comparison and no context. Say no, and you risk being labelled cautious in a system that worships the bold. There’s no perfect answer, only the right answer for the driver you intend to become.
This is where Brundle’s back-to-basics advice feels oddly modern. Reduce the sport to its atoms. Execute the next braking zone. Nail the next rotation. Don’t live in the rumour mill; live in sector twos. Hadjar’s arc since Melbourne suggests he’s wired that way already, and that’s why this run matters more than any phone call might. The best leverage a young driver can have is momentum—and right now, he’s built some.
None of this guarantees a fairy tale. The 2025 grid is ruthless, and Red Bull’s chessboard rarely stays still for long. But Hadjar has moved from raw prospect to credible operator in the space of a few months, and he did it the old-fashioned way: by racing better on Sundays than he did the Sunday before.
If Red Bull come calling, he’ll face the coin toss that’s tripped up bigger names. If they don’t—yet—he’s making a strong case to simply keep doing what he’s doing. In a year that began with a lonely trudge back to the garage in Albert Park, that’s not a bad place to be.
The lesson from Brundle, distilled to its purest form, still applies: cut through the drama. There’s a straight. There’s a right. There’s a left. Repeat until further notice. And if Zandvoort is anything to go by, the kid’s listening.
