Hadjar’s Best Drive of the Season Undone by Front Wing Failure as Mekies Hails His Progress at Red Bull

• Isack Hadjar qualified fifth for the British Grand Prix, two places ahead of Max Verstappen, before a damaged front wing cost him around eight seconds in the pits.
• Team principal Laurent Mekies praised Hadjar’s progress and consistency, saying it’s “a step forward every time he goes out with the car.”
• Red Bull’s next race is the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps on July 17-19.

Isack Hadjar produced the strongest race of his 2026 season at Silverstone, only to watch it fall apart when a damaged front wing cost him around eight seconds in the pits.

Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies praised the 21-year-old Frenchman’s progress after the British Grand Prix, even as Hadjar himself called the weekend “a waste of a race.”

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A STRONG WEEKEND BEFORE THE TROUBLE STARTED

Hadjar qualified fifth for the British Grand Prix, two places ahead of team-mate Max Verstappen, who was struggling with balance and power unit problems all weekend. It capped a strong follow-up to his run to points in Austria the previous week, and it left him well placed heading into the race outright ahead of his more experienced team-mate.

He held that fifth spot at the start of the race until Verstappen passed him on the fourth lap. From there, Hadjar noticed his pace falling away and assumed the issue was tyre wear rather than anything mechanical.

“A very good start this time,” Hadjar said afterward. “The pace in the first three laps was very nice. I think I was kind of kind with Max! Also it was good to follow him, which I was doing really well. And then suddenly, a huge drop-off of pace.”

He pitted for fresh rubber, hoping new tyres would fix the problem. They did not, and the confusion in the car only grew from there.

“I thought, okay, maybe there’s something wrong I did in terms of tyre management,” he said. “I went on the hard new tyres, no pace, very confused.”

HOW THE FRONT WING COST HIM A SHOT AT FOURTH

It was only at his second stop that Red Bull’s engineers traced the drop-off to front wing damage rather than tyres, and swapped the part before sending him back out. The repair cost around eight seconds in the pit lane, on top of the laps already lost while the team worked out what was wrong, but the difference in the car once it was fixed was immediate and obvious to Hadjar himself.

“I was told we were missing load on the car, and once they changed the front wing, I went back again, and I gained nearly two seconds straight away,” Hadjar said. “So a waste of a race, really.”

Without the wing damage, Hadjar reckons he had the pace to challenge Lando Norris for fourth place, a result that would have been comfortably his best of the season. He also lost a shot at more positions when the race failed to restart after the late safety car triggered by Verstappen’s crash, denying him the final laps he wanted to press home the advantage his repaired car had suddenly found.

“I had the stint on the medium, great pace,” he said. “Okay, there’s something to be done on that final lap, especially with all the deployment game, I had warm tyres. So I don’t know why we didn’t restart. I definitely wanted a final lap; it would have been maybe a shot at a podium.”

Hadjar did get an early taste of racing his team-mate directly before his troubles began, running close behind Verstappen for several laps in the opening stint. It was a rare glimpse of what a clean weekend for both Red Bull cars together might look like.

“It was fun, it was great, and I felt good behind him for a couple of laps, until I lost everything,” he said. “He was very impressive today again, he was fighting for a podium, so good information. But I wish I didn’t have to change the front wing.”

MEKIES ON A SEASON OF STEADY GAINS

Mekies said the wing failure was still under investigation on Sunday evening, unrelated to the separate rear wing issue that had put Verstappen in the gravel, but he did not hold back on his assessment of Hadjar’s weekend regardless of the mechanical setback.

“We have read a loss of performance on Isack’s car in the race,” Mekies said. “It’s too early to say why the wing was damaged, but it was frustrating. On the positive side, I think Isack produced a strong weekend.”

The Red Bull boss pointed to Hadjar’s consistency across a season in which the team’s car has swung between competitive and difficult from one race to the next, arguing that the raw result on any given Sunday tells only part of the story.

“Honestly, he has been strong since the beginning of the season, in a way that in the bad weekends, where the car was good, and when the car was not good, he was able to do his own path and to progress race after race, in terms of experience, in terms of skills,” Mekies said.

He added that Hadjar’s development alongside a four-time world champion has been a factor in that progress. “He’s learning a lot from Max, he’s learning a bit more every time he drives the car. And today was no different. He’s not going to be satisfied with a P5 or with a P4, we are not going to be either.”

Mekies said Red Bull will keep pushing regardless of the result on any given Sunday, treating Silverstone as one more data point in a longer trajectory rather than a weekend to be judged in isolation. “Certainly the big picture for us is that it’s a step forward every time he goes out with the car, and that’s positive for the rest of the season.”

WHY HADJAR SOUNDS DIFFERENT TO VERSTAPPEN

One notable contrast from Silverstone was how differently the two Red Bull drivers spoke about the car. Verstappen has been vocal about the RB22’s balance problems all year, while Hadjar tends to describe the same issues in milder terms even when the underlying complaint is identical. Mekies puts that down to experience rather than any difference of opinion between his two drivers.

“Max is unhappy with the car balance, that’s a fact,” Mekies said. “He feels that the underlying performance of the car could bring into much better results if we manage to solve the balance limitations we are having.”

“I think Isack reads the same balance limitation, a similar balance limitation, so we are not in a situation where one driver says ‘A’, and the other driver says ‘B’. They are describing the same thing, they are describing it in a different way.”

“I think Max is projecting what he feels the potential of the car will be, whilst Isack, being a bit newer to the game, probably doesn’t elaborate into that so much.”

That distinction counts for something in how Red Bull reads its own car. If both drivers are describing the same balance problem in different language, it gives the engineering team a clearer signal than if their two fastest drivers disagreed on the diagnosis. It also suggests Hadjar’s calmer public tone is a product of where he is in his career rather than a sign he is any less frustrated by days like Silverstone, where a strong car and a difficult one turned out to be separated by a single damaged component.

For Hadjar, the result at Silverstone will not show up as anything more than a handful of points, if that, once the final classification is set. But the underlying pace, and the praise it earned from his team principal, points to a driver Red Bull believes is closing in on a result that matches the performances. Red Bull’s next chance to turn that progress into a result on the scoreboard comes at the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps on July 17-19.

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Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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