The debut at Red Bull
The first three races of the 2026 season ended with unexpected results for Red Bull, clearly struggling with competitiveness as well as for the four-time world champion Max Verstappen. A delicate moment for the Milton Keynes team, where Isack Hadjar made his debut this year, who nevertheless managed to surpass the four-time Dutch world champion in the standings. No one, before him, had ever achieved such milestones in the internal challenge with Verstappen, all in his second year in F1 after the experience in Racing Bulls in 2025.
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Entry into the Junior Team
Yet, the career of the Franco-Algerian driver in the feeder categories was not at all simple, with few victories collected between the French F4 and the UAE championships. Despite this, in 2021, Hadjar received the proposal from Helmut Marko to join the Red Bull Junior Team, with the offer that caused great emotions for him and his parents: “It was a period in my career when I was uncertain. I had no clear direction, I didn’t know what I would do – he told the official F1 website – even financing the whole year was difficult, so we didn’t even know if we would manage to finish it. It was a complicated situation. So, the relief after signing with Red Bull came. It was something they took a while to accept. Even when I had the helmet and the Red Bull colors, I still couldn’t believe it“.
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Hadjar officially joined the Red Bull academy in 2022, but the first contact with Marko took place in 2021, the year the Frenchman won the race in Monaco in the Formula Regional European championship: “The very day of the victory I had a meeting with him in the evening and I was obviously very impressed – he recalled – for me Formula 1 has never been unreachable, it has always been my goal, but it remains the pinnacle. And meeting these people in person, talking to him, hearing him say: ‘Yes, I’m sending you a contract. You sign or you don’t, okay?’ It was all very direct. It was really impressive, but above all, it was a relief“.
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