Last Updated on March 20 2025, 12:47 pm
If there was ever a sign that Formula One now has its woke brigade, the response to Isack Hadjar’s criticism from Dr. Helmut Marko was it. The French-Algerian rookie had a nightmare start to his F1 career in Australia as he crashed out oil the second corner of the formation lap.
Hadjar had delivered a decent weekend’s performance prior to this qualifying just outside the top ten, the best of the 2025 new full time kids on the block. In practice one Isack was quicker than his experienced team mate Yuki Tsunoda and just hours later on Friday afternoon the pair out in lap times leaving them 6th and 5th respectively.
The Racing Bulls driver missed out on a place in Q3 by just 6000ths of a second to Carlos Sainz in the Williams, but come the wet weather on Sunday and Hadjar out before the race begun. He was later seen in the pit lane sobbing his heart out for the world to see and Anthony Hamilton decided to offer some comfort.
Hadjar crying “embarrassing”
Red Bull’s head of the junior racing programme labelled Isack as a bit of a cry baby when describing his crying as “embarrassing,” yet in contrast to Dr. Marko’s unsympathetic description, Red Bull team boss Christian Horner was more empathetic stating: “It was quite heart-wrenching to see him so gutted at his first grand prix.
“I think the positives he needs to take out of it, when he reflects on the weekend – he actually performed very well in the practices and the qualifying.
“You forget that these guys are just kids, really. Obviously a lot of emotion for him today, but I think when he strips it back, there’s an awful lot of positives that he can take out of the weekend. He’s got many bright days ahead of him,” concluded the boss from Milton Keynes.
The experienced Charles Sainz was also to suffer a similar fate to had jar when his Williams hit the wall at the final corner behind the safety car which was deployed to deal with Jack Doohan’s altercations with the barrier. He was asked today in Shanghai for his thoughts on the matter.
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Sainz say emotion “understandable”
“Understandable, completely understandable. You have so many other drivers going through the same emotions,” said there Spaniard. “Some choose to show it publicly, others don’t. But the reality is those emotions are always there
“It’s just a matter whether you want people to see it or not. In this case, Isack I guess couldn’t avoid everyone seeing it because of the situation he was in.”
As Carlos says, drivers handle the enormous disappointment of making a mistake and crashing out in different ways, but the sorry sight of Isaac Hadjar returning to the pit lane was exacerbated by Hamilton Snr’s intervention. Walking up to him and embracing the Racing Bulls driver right in front of the cameras made the young driver look to be emotionally inept.
Hadjar didn’t ask for the embrace and he made efforts to cover his emotions in there usual fashion by keeping his racing helmet on. Yet he received a withering comment from his mentor Dr. Marko who has suffered some criticism for failing to respect others mental health issuers.
Now it’s a “mental health” issue
Ewan Gale writing for Total-Motorsport argues the comments from Marko, “make a mockery of the push in recent years to highlight male mental health and helping those dealing with difficulty to show emotion, rather than hide those feelings away.
“Many drivers on the grid have advocated for mental health charities in recent years and Marko found himself in hot water over comments directed at McLaren driver Lando Norris regarding “mental weakness”.
“The missed opportunity is that rather than reinforcing the support to the work that has happened over the last couple of decades in the openness around talking of mental health issues,” Gale concludes.
Yet this is not a mental health issue by any stretch of the imagination and ascribing perfectly reasonable devastating emotions to this illness does nothing but damage the cause.
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Marko’s comments largely ignored
The Marko comments relating to Lando Norris which Gale cites were made at last year’s USGP as F1 was about to enter is tightly packed schedule for the final six races of the year. At the time there was more than a remote hope that Lando Norris could challenge Max Verstappen for the 2024 drivers’ world title. Dr. Marko was merely playing the usual mind games we see between teams and their drivers.
Of course the CEO of McLaren, Zak Brown had his say on the matter, but it was treated by the rest of the paddock as the usual robust kind of mental horseplay. “I read Helmut’s comments, which I felt were disappointing but not surprising,” said Brown. “Lando has been an ambassador for mental health. It is a serious issue that he has brought to the forefront and to make it OK to talk about. To choose to poke at that situation is pretty inappropriate and it sets us back 10 or 20 years.”
Yet the reality is that in sport mental toughness is what separates the mend from the boys, it creates iconic champions like Tiger Woods and Roger Federa, both of whom suffered relentless pressure from their parents at a young age when learning their craft.
Astronauts too are selected for their mental strength given the life and death situations they face daily when outside of earth’s atmosphere. The simple matter of fact is that Isaac Hadjar is just a kid and he cried, something you wouldn’t see from the likes of Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton who are die hards in their sport and have seen it all before.
Hadjar now admits it was “embarrassing”
When asked about the matter today in China, the Red Bull driver made light of the situation, even agreeing with his mentor Dr. Marko. “I found it embarrassing, myself,” admitted Hadjar. “Helmut, I had him on the phone a day later and it’s all good. I’ve known him [for] a few years now, I know how he works.
“Also, another point, I think [when he] said that he was speaking German, it was reinterpreted differently. You don’t know about the body language, I didn’t see the footage. So I can’t say much.”
Isack went on to say it was “nice” to receive the public support following his rookie error and that he rebounded “quite quickly” from the emotional outburst. “I would say on Monday already I felt quite a lot better,” said Hadjar ahead of this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix.
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Band wagon journalism does nothing to help
Dr. Marko has delivered around a third of the current F1 drivers’ at times to the F1 grid and his methods are tough, but respected by his proteges. Accusing him of “mental abuse” is utterly ridiculous and Isack Hadjar crying in Melbourne was not a “mental health” issue, he was just very upset.
Veteran F1 writer, Eddie Straw ranked Hadjar last amongst the drivers from the Australian GP. Maybe this is also too harsh and may send the young driver over the edge? But Straw concludes his crash on the formation lap was “the definition of a rookie error, but one that can’t be excused when it comes to his ranking.”
F1 was made to look foolish in the past with tokenism gestures like copying the NFL players, taking the knee. Out of context this looked ridiculous given it was a response to the US national anthem being played at each sporting event, and by refusing to stand the players were calling into account the legitimacy of the authorities they were under.
When Lewis Hamilton persuaded some of th3 F1 drivers to follow suit, the gestures looked silly and were culturally irrelevant to many. Any attempt to make the Hadjar crying story a mental health issue is merely bandwagoning at its worst. The kid crashed, the kid cried, game over.
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With over 30 years of experience in Formula 1 as an insider journalist, I have built trusted connections across the paddock, from race engineers and mechanics to senior team figures. At The Judge 13, I and a handful of trusted colleagues share exclusive Formula 1 news, expert analysis and behind-the-scenes stories you will not find in mainstream motorsport media.
