Hadjar’s big step
2025 was the year of Isack Hadjar‘s Formula 1 debut, a driver who, after a debut to forget in Australia, delivered increasingly convincing performances for Racing Bulls throughout the season. A performance strong enough to convince Red Bull to bet on him for this year as Max Verstappen’s teammate, in a team where he will find a familiar figure in Laurent Mekies.
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Pure speed
The French engineer, Team Principal of the Milton Keynes-based team, had in fact held the same role at Racing Bulls before taking over from Christian Horner, and will return to work with the 21-year-old for this world championship. During his time in Faenza, the former Ferrari man was particularly struck by a characteristic of the young driver, described in the podcast James Allen on F1.
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In his speech, in addition to praising Hadjar’s talent, Mekies also indicated the need to protect his compatriot from the pressures of sharing the garage with a teammate like four-time world champion Verstappen: “First of all, we are not hiding behind the fact that we need to do a better job with the second car, and that includes the second part of last year – he explained – I think we made some progress with Tsunoda, but not at the level we felt we needed to reach, so we are aware that we need to do a better job there. There is no easy solution, so it is a complex equation that we approach as such. Now, I think Isack has incredible speed. We believe in pure speed. We think the level at which he started last season, his initial speed, was exceptional. Exceptional at the level of the best, but we also believe that the greats, the champions, not only have an incredible starting point, but they progress. It’s not just a progression in maturity or in dialogue with engineers; they actually go faster. You get to race five or race ten and they start doing something with the car they’ve never done before. We saw that with Isack last year at Racing Bulls. We are convinced that the potential is huge.”
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