Red Bull’s driver merry-go-round may soon take a distinctly French turn. While the team searches for a new partner to race alongside Max Verstappen next season, one name keeps being mentioned in the paddock: Isack Hadjar. The 20-year-old Frenchman is enjoying an impressive rookie campaign, driving a car so uncompetitive that it probably wheezes when parked, yet he still manages to make it look respectable.
His performances have already caught the eye of Helmut Marko, who has compared Hadjar to Verstappen himself with his trademark understatement.
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Rookie no more
Hadjar’s first season in Formula 1 has been far from quiet. While the Racing Bulls haven’t exactly threatened the podium on merit, the young Frenchman has delivered flashes of brilliance that have made everyone sit up and take notice. His podium finish in Zandvoort was impressive enough, but setting the fastest time in the first free practice session in Mexico made headlines for all the right reasons.
On paper, it’s a largely meaningless statistic. FP1 sessions are notorious for their lack of representative running, with top teams often concealing their true pace. Yet for a rookie like Hadjar, such a result speaks volumes. It demonstrates not only raw speed, but also adaptability, the capacity to familiarise oneself with an unfamiliar circuit more quickly than one can say ‘team orders’. This is the kind of quality that made Verstappen’s name at Toro Rosso, and Marko has certainly taken note of it.
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When Helmut Marko starts throwing around compliments, young drivers have every reason to feel both honoured and terrified.
In an interview with Nextgen-auto.com, Marko said, “He’s showing again that he’s like Max. It doesn’t take him long to reach the limits of a track. Then everyone got the measure of the grip, and he returned to his position in Q2 and Q3.”
In Marko’s vocabulary, that’s practically a love letter. The Austrian is known for his ruthlessly high standards and for losing his temper when those standards aren’t met. Being compared to Verstappen, even in part, is about as high a compliment as Red Bull’s talent guru can give.
Hadjar’s learning curve seems remarkably on a good trajectory. He has shown consistency, speed and composure, and, unlike some of his predecessors on the Red Bull junior programme, he has not yet received a “we’ve decided to move in a different direction” phone call.
That alone puts him ahead of half a dozen former hopefuls.
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Tsunoda’s fading light
Marko’s comments also carried a clear subtext: Yuki Tsunoda’s seat is in trouble. The Japanese driver’s improvement has been steady, but not spectacular.
“Tsunoda was eliminated from qualifying again in the second session, finishing 11th,” Marko pointed out.
“He is gradually improving and his results are improving too, but he is still performing worse in qualifying than in the race. He must learn to control this.”
In other words, ‘Yuki, you’re not fast enough on Saturdays, and Sundays start in the midfield ain’t good enough.’
Although Tsunoda has worked hard to overcome his early-career volatility, Red Bull is not a team that rewards patience. With Pérez gone and the second Red Bull seat vacant, Hadjar’s timing could not be better.
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The new Verstappen label is a blessing and a curse
Of course, being dubbed ‘the new Verstappen’ is as much a curse as it is a compliment. For every prodigy who thrives under that kind of comparison, several more crumble under the pressure. Verstappen’s rise was meteoric because he was a once-in-a-generation talent who combined fearlessness with an extraordinary ability to control the car. While it is flattering to be mentioned in the same breath, it also sets an almost impossible benchmark.
However, Hadjar’s personality might be his biggest asset. He appears calm, grounded and mature beyond his years, the kind of temperament that Red Bull desperately needs to balance out Verstappen’s intensity. If the Frenchman can maintain that composure under the team’s notorious internal pressure, he might just succeed where others have failed.
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If Red Bull does promote Hadjar, it will be a statement of faith in its junior programme and of intent for the future. The team needs a driver who can challenge Verstappen without destabilising him: someone talented enough to secure points for the constructors’ championship, but also wise enough to avoid provoking him. Hadjar, with his measured approach and growing speed, could fit that bill.
Then again, this is Red Bull. Calm, reasoned decisions aren’t exactly their brand. If Hadjar does get the call, he will be stepping into the most unforgiving seat in motorsport, where careers are often measured in months rather than years. However, if he really is the ‘new Verstappen’, perhaps he will write his own story rather than living in someone else’s shadow.
Time will tell whether Helmut Marko’s latest favourite can deliver on the hype, but one thing’s certain: France might just have produced its next Formula 1 superstar. What do you think, jury? Has Red Bull’s next Max arrived, or will this discovery be another failed experiment?
MORE F1 NEWS – Piastri’s decline: The analysis
It all looked so good just five race weekends ago for Oscar Piastri. At the Dutch Grand Prix the Australian entered the exclusive Formula One drivers’ club – there Grand Chelm – by claiming pole position, fastest lap and leading from lights out to the chequered flag.
Jim Clarke leads this iconic group of drivers with eight Grand Chelms and of the current drivers Lewis Hamilton and Max Vertsappen each have six – Max’s latest in Baku this season – Fernando Alonso, Charles Leclerc and now Oscar Piastri have just one.
A Grand Chelm is particularly difficult to achieve as Lando Norris found out last weekend in Mexico. Although he claimed pole position and led every lap, it was George Russell who claimed the fastest lap of the race, by a whopping 7/10ths of a second from the McLaren driver who was clearly looking after his tyres.
McLaren boss warned about Red Bull after Monza
Yet since Piastri’s achievement in Zandvoort, the wheels have come off his championship challenge. Then 34 points ahead of his team mate Lando Norris and with McLaren looking each week as though they would finish 1-2, the title was surely all but in the bag for the Aussie.
Then came Monza. A genius Red Bull upgrade saw Max Verstappen romp to victory in Ferrari’s back year by a whopping twenty seconds. McLaren team boss Andreas Stella was immediately concerned and when asked was the world champion back in the title fight despite his 94 point deficit, he was adamant.
“I used the capital letters already… We’re talking about Max Verstappen, we’re talking about Red Bull. We have already seen in Monza that they improved. They seem to have made an improvement with their car, because the way they won Monza was something more for what was our assessment than simply a car that adapts well at low drag.
“They were fast in the corners, medium-speed and low-speed corners, fast in the straights, and we know that Max, when he has a competitive car, can deliver strong weekends. Conversely, we also knew that… Baku for us would have been a difficult circuit,” concluded the McLaren boss...READ MORE ON THIS STORY
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.
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