Isack Hadjar’s impressive F1 start has surprised his own team

Isack Hadjar might well be the standout F1 rookie of 2025: not only has he survived being a Red Bull junior driver for longer than five minutes, the 20-year-old Frenchman has reached Q3 six times and outscored his more experienced teammate(s) by 21 points to four so far. Magnifique!

That’s partly down to a best finish of sixth in Monaco, which – let’s be real here – isn’t exactly a safe, cuddly environment for infant F1 drivers still learning how to walk. Even Max Verstappen had a couple of big crashes in Monte Carlo before he properly mastered it.

But Hadjar nailed it first time, and heading into Canada this weekend he’s now on a run of three straight top 10 finishes. Not even his own team thought he’d hit the ground running like this.

“If we were telling you that we were expecting that, we would be lying,” says team principal Laurent Mekies, sitting down with TG at the Miami Grand Prix a few weeks ago. CEO Peter Bayer chips in: “We would have signed him last year!”

There was a bit of a queue back then. The team started last season with Yuki Tsunoda and Daniel Ricciardo in the garage, before the Red Bull mothership finally lost patience with the Aussie and axed him in Singapore in September.

He was immediately replaced by Liam Lawson – who’d impressed during a brief stint in the car when Ricciardo broke his hand a year earlier – but even though the New Zealander made little impact at the tail end of 2024, when Sergio Perez was dispatched Red Bull promoted him anyway. We all know how that played out.

But while the global spotlight was beaming down on the second Red Bull seat, hardly anyone was paying attention to who’d end up in the ‘other’ RB. And Hadjar’s number one fan at the time? Only Red Bull’s never-sugar-coat-anything motorsport adviser, Helmut Marko.

“In all fairness, Helmut already last year said he did [expect Hadjar to be fast],” says Bayer. “He was adamant about it. ‘He is the kid that will have the speed, that will have the confidence, that will have the ability’, and he was very, very clear from probably halfway through the season when the Daniel discussion started.

“Helmut said ‘Look, for me it’s no doubt: [signing him is] what we have to do’.”

Surprised? You’ll remember that Hadjar’s first race ended in tears – literally – after he crashed out on the formation lap in Australia back in March, and Marko later called his emotions “embarrassing”. Which wasn’t brilliant PR.

But Bayer – who, like Marko, is Austrian – reckons the 82-year-old sounded harsher than intended because he’d been interviewed in German. “What he said, the word does not directly translate into ‘embarrassing’, actually,” he explains. “It’s one level below, and it's something that you would use in your family more than in an official statement.”

Mekies adds: “The truth is, Helmut was the biggest supporter of Isack from day one. He's probably the one that was the least surprised by how extraordinary he’s been.

“And already in Melbourne, all of us, including Helmut, were massively, massively impressed by how he had performed on Friday and on Saturday.

“So, the comment is the comment. But if you had asked him at the end of the Melbourne weekend to rate this first weekend in terms of speed, it would have been sky high.”

Visa Cash App Racing Bulls’ line-up (that’s the only time we’ll write the name out in full, we promise) looks fairly settled for now, but recent form suggests there only has to be a medium-sized crisis somewhere along the ladder for that to change.

How does the team help Lawson bounce back from being chewed up by the senior squad? “It's no different with Liam than with all the other guys,” says Mekies. “All we do all day is try to build an environment where our people – drivers, engineers, staff – can express themselves at best. And that's what we're trying to do with Liam.”

At this precise moment Hadjar and Lawson tiptoe past RB’s Hard Rock Stadium hospitality tent, each carrying... a giant water pistol. As you do. Team bonding in action? “That’s what they need!” laughs Bayer, and Mekies quips: “It’s probably part of the programme!”

He carries on: “But yeah, in the end there is some truth in it, you know? You need to feel good to perform well. And it's not only for the drivers, it's for everyone. And these guys, they need to be able to push in the car, and if they are not comfortable in the car to push then the performance will not come.

“So what we are focused on right now is just to make sure we are able to give him a car he’s able to push with. If he is able to push, we think the speed level will be the right one.”