Hadjar probes Miami pace drop before Canada

Isack Hadjar said Red Bull has spent the build-up to the Canadian Grand Prix trying to understand why he was so far adrift of Max Verstappen in Miami, after the team’s upgraded RB22 produced the biggest qualifying gap between the pair this season.

Red Bull introduced a significant upgrade package in Miami, where Verstappen put the car on the front row but Hadjar was more than eight tenths slower in qualifying and looked uncomfortable from the start of the weekend. That was a sharp change from the opening races, when he had generally been much closer to his team-mate, including finishing 0.158 seconds ahead at Suzuka and just a tenth behind in China.

Hadjar said the team had gone back through the data before arriving in Montreal. “There was a lot of work ongoing since I arrived here to understand, go deep in the analysis, to understand why I was this far away, why on our side of the garage we had so many issues,” Hadjar said. “Definitely we didn’t do a good job, but we’re going to certainly do a lot better this weekend.”

Miami then became even more costly. After his car failed post-qualifying technical checks, Hadjar had to start from the pit lane. He recovered to 16th before crashing at Turn 14 on lap five, a mistake he said still frustrated him because the race had been moving toward a points finish.

“I was just pissed off at myself, a lack of focus,” he said. “Everything was going well before that. We had the right tyres on, overtaking was good. It was clear that we would end up in the points.”

That leaves Montreal as an important reset weekend for Hadjar, who has only one top-10 finish from the first four rounds and sits 13th in the drivers’ championship. With the sprint format in place, he will have only one practice session to find his rhythm and, as he put it, “join the fight with the other guys.”

Hadjar said Red Bull has not brought major new changes for Canada, which puts the focus on whether Miami was a one-off on his side of the garage rather than a broader limitation of the upgraded car. He believes Circuit Gilles Villeneuve should be a better fit for the RB22’s characteristics.

“It depends on what the other teams brought [but] we didn’t do anything for this weekend,” Hadjar said. “I expect our car to be working well in this speed range. There’s no high-speed corners, so it should definitely suit us a bit better. So I’m confident performance-wise we can replicate something close to Miami.”