Racing
© Jonathan Borba
Isack Hadjar believes Red Bull’s first three races have already shown he belongs alongside Max Verstappen, arguing that his pace relative to the world champion matters more than modest results because the car has been “very hard to drive.”
At a team where Verstappen has regularly left his team-mates far behind, Hadjar said he went into the move knowing the scale of the challenge. In an interview with F1, Hadjar said, “Of course I did, in a way,” when asked if he had worried about taking Red Bull’s second seat. “If you look at the gaps between Max's team-mates, you're like, ‘Well, this is weird’.”
He said that concern did not last long. Hadjar insisted he stayed realistic about the situation under the new rules and backed his own level. “If I believe I'm good, I'm good, and that’s the end of the story,” he said.
That confidence has been reinforced by the opening three rounds in Australia, China and Japan. Red Bull has struggled to fight at the front, and Hadjar said the RB22 has suffered major balance problems, leaving both drivers with a difficult package. Even so, he said, “For the first three races, everything has gone how I anticipated it.”
The results have been limited so far, with eighth place in Shanghai his only points finish across those weekends, but Hadjar argued that does not tell the full story. “It’s a small sample, the car is what it is right now, it’s very hard to drive,” he said. “I'm not too far [away], and I'm happy with how I delivered in those first three races with the car I had underneath me.”
For Hadjar, that is the key measure of his start at Red Bull. Rather than judging the early season only by points, he sees his closeness to Verstappen in a difficult car as evidence that he has justified the team’s decision to promote him from Racing Bulls and replace Yuki Tsunoda.
“All in all, it’s pretty good,” Hadjar said, framing those first three weekends as proof that he is worthy of a seat at the front of the grid if Red Bull can turn that pace into results.