Isack Hadjar on the Red Bull rumour mill: “It scares me… and it’s incredibly exciting”
Isack Hadjar has barely unpacked his rookie suitcase and already half the paddock wants to know which garage he’ll be walking into next year. The Frenchman’s surge to a maiden F1 podium at Zandvoort shoved him under the brightest of spotlights, and with Red Bull weighing up its 2026 options alongside Max Verstappen, Hadjar’s name has shot to the front of the queue.
Publicly, both camps are playing it cool. Red Bull insists nothing is signed for 2026 and that decisions will come in their own time, stressing they’re “in the very lucky position of having 4 seats to fill.” That’s corporate for: everyone’s on the hook until they’re not. Behind the scenes, the Marko-meter appears to be running hot for Hadjar, though not everyone in the room is ready to ink it just yet.
Hadjar, to his credit, is dealing with the noise the way quick drivers tend to—by parking it. Asked in Baku if he already knows his future, he grinned: “I have an idea, but…” As for the daily swirl around his name, he shrugged it off. “I don’t care. I really don’t care. I had, like, five days off at home and other things to do than scrolling on Instagram.”
He’s not pretending it wouldn’t be a monster step. Pairing with Verstappen is the sport’s toughest exam paper, and he knows it. “It scares me, but it’s also incredibly exciting!” he said in a French TV sit-down due to air on Canal+. “Seeing myself team up with Max? Of course! And what a line-up! Of course, it’s early in my career, but I may have this opportunity. You give me the same car as the best driver in the world, and he’s right next to me. I have the opportunity to compare myself to him, and I have the same chances as him.”
Is that destiny? He didn’t shy away. Asked if suggestions he’s Red Bull-bound are “spoilers,” Hadjar replied: “You’re not really spoiling, it’s the trajectory. It’s written.”
Red Bull, for its part, has a well-thumbed playbook. When a junior lights the beacons, the senior team looks hard—and fast. Hadjar’s rookie season has ticked the right boxes: speed, composure, and the sort of bounce-back you can’t coach. Remember the brutal sting of that formation-lap crash in his first race? He’ve moved past it, then stuck it on the podium at one of the trickiest circuits on the calendar. That’s the sort of resilience the big team loves.
The 20-year-old says the driving’s the easy bit; it’s the engineering depth where he’s pouring his energy in the final third of the year. “I think from an engineering point of view, maybe,” he said when asked where he still needs to improve. “It’s such a technical world, I would say, as a rookie, it’s where I’m learning the most. Not really driving the car, I know how to do that.”
He’s been busy winning hearts back home, too. Hadjar gave France a taste of Red Bull nostalgia with a demo run at Magny-Cours in the howling RB7, sharing the stage with Sébastien Buemi and Sébastien Loeb. “That was pretty awesome. I didn’t expect that many people! So, yeah, that was basically my French Grand Prix, a kind of home race, so that was good,” he said, before adding the delightful rookie kicker: “It’s a nice feeling, but the wrist is burning!”
As ever with Red Bull, the calculus isn’t just about talent. It’s about fit, chemistry, and timing—especially if the alternative is continuity with Yuki Tsunoda, who’s carved out his own niche as a dependable points-hunter and a far more rounded operator than his early F1 self. The Verstappen seat is the sharpest blade in the drawer; only those certain to wield it get the call.
Hadjar isn’t begging for it. He doesn’t have to. He just needs more of the same: keep qualifying sharp, make the racecraft count, and turn the odd big Sunday into a trend rather than a headline. The rest will take care of itself.
If there’s a lesson from the last decade of Red Bull’s junior conveyor belt, it’s that the best argument you can make is lap time. The second-best is how you carry yourself when things go wrong. Hadjar’s already shown both.
And if he’s right—if the trajectory really is “written”—then the only spoiler that matters is on the back of the car he’ll climb into next year.
