- Hadjar admits Red Bull’s second seat history made him question his move.
- The 21-year-old has out-qualified Verstappen twice in three races.
- New regulations may finally break the curse, but three races prove little.
Isack Hadjar says he briefly questioned his decision to join Red Bull before pushing those doubts aside.
The 21-year-old French-Algerian, now in his first season as Max Verstappen’s team-mate, admits the pattern of struggling drivers at the team gave him pause.
But he says his belief in his own ability was enough to silence those concerns.
Hadjar made the comments in an exclusive interview with Formula 1 ahead of the Miami Grand Prix week.
Acknowledging the pattern
Red Bull’s second seat has been one of the most unstable positions on the Formula 1 grid since Daniel Ricciardo left at the end of 2018.
Pierre Gasly lasted 12 races before being dropped. Alex Albon held the seat for little more than a season. Sergio Perez survived the longest but was cut after a poor 2024 campaign.
Liam Lawson then replaced Perez for 2025. But he was replaced by Yuki Tsunoda after just two race weekends.
Hadjar stepped into that seat for 2026 after a strong rookie campaign with Racing Bulls. He finished 12th in the 2025 drivers’ championship with 51 points and claimed his first F1 podium at the Dutch Grand Prix.
He says the history of the seat was not lost on him.
“Of course I did, in a way, because you look at the gaps between Max’s teammates and you’re like, ‘Wow, this is weird,'” he said.
Albon has previously described the Red Bull car as being built tightly around Verstappen’s preferences. He once claimed that the steering sensitivity was so extreme that the lightest touch could upset the car.
That environment has proved difficult for every driver who has tried to work within it.
“That’s the end of the story”
Hadjar chose to frame his arrival at Red Bull as a clean beginning rather than another chapter in a troubled history.
He pointed to the 2026 regulatory overhaul as a reason to set the past aside.
“At the same time, I’m realistic. It’s a new regulation, we have the same car,” he said. “If I believe I’m good, I’m good, and that’s the end of the story.”
That confidence has some basis in results. Hadjar has out-qualified Verstappen on two occasions in the opening three rounds of the season.
It is worth noting, however, that Verstappen was eliminated in Q1 at the season opener following a crash that was later attributed to a technical fault on his car.
Hadjar also revealed that his public talk of taking things step by step last year masked a more ambitious private goal.
“I knew that if I did the job naturally, I would get the seat, the promotion, and to be honest, that was my target starting the year,” he said.
“I was like, ‘I’m going to take it step by step, blah blah blah.’ That’s what I was saying, but in fact I wanted to have a big, big rookie season, step into the Red Bull, and that was it.”
Can Hadjar break the cycle?
Three factors separate Hadjar’s situation from those of his predecessors. The first of which is timing.
The 2026 regulations mean Red Bull is working from a new baseline, not a car shaped by years of Verstappen’s specific feedback.
The second is circumstance. Previous seat-holders such as Gasly, Albon and Perez all competed in a car already calibrated to one driver’s particular style. Hadjar does not face that disadvantage to the same degree.
The third is temperament. After a difficult Japanese Grand Prix, Hadjar acknowledged that the mood inside the team was “not good.”
He added, though, that everyone was working to understand the car’s issues and that he expected the next upgrade package to help.
The five-week gap between the Japanese and Miami rounds gives Red Bull time to develop the car.
For Isack Hadjar, it is also time to settle further into a team that has chewed through drivers for the better part of a decade.
Three races is a short window on which to draw conclusions.
But Hadjar has arrived in a seat that has disrupted careers, spoken plainly about the doubts he felt, and chosen to compete rather than retreat into the weight of that history.
