Isack Hadjar fractured his wrist punching a heavy bag filled with sand. That single, strange detail from a routine summer training session is the reason Yuki Tsunoda is back in a Formula 1 cockpit this weekend at Zandvoort, nine months after the sport pushed him out of it.
“It was a very unexpected thing,” Tsunoda said of the call-up. “I’m actually quite calm and looking forward to tomorrow.” Then, unable to hide it any longer, he let the mask slip. “I can’t be sad. It was the moment I was waiting for. I was dying to have this kind of moment.”
A boxing bag, sand, and a strange coincidence
Sky Sports F1 reporter Craig Slater broke the specifics of Hadjar’s injury after Red Bull’s initial announcement left the cause vague. “He includes boxing as part of his training; he did boxing as a child growing up, and he has fractured his wrist punching a heavy bag in the gym. A bag filled with sand,” Slater said. “So he’s out this weekend. He will be replaced by Liam Lawson. This is a really strange one.”
Red Bull confirmed the wrist injury occurred over the summer shutdown and ruled Hadjar out of the Dutch Grand Prix entirely. “The Team wishes Isack a speedy recovery and thanks Liam for stepping in on short notice,” the team said in a statement. Racing Bulls, the sister squad that will lend its reserve driver to fill the resulting gap, added its own message: “We thank both Liam and Yuki for their adaptability as the teams prepare for the weekend.”
The reshuffle triggered a chain reaction across Red Bull’s entire driver roster. Lawson moves up from Racing Bulls to partner Max Verstappen at Red Bull for the weekend, taking Hadjar’s RB22 seat. Tsunoda, who has spent 2026 as reserve driver after losing his own Red Bull seat to Hadjar at the end of last year, steps into Lawson’s vacated Racing Bulls car alongside rookie Arvid Lindblad.
The strange symmetry of Zandvoort
There is a detail buried in this reshuffle that nobody in the paddock could have scripted. Lawson has now benefited twice from a driver injuring their hand at this exact circuit. In 2023, he replaced an injured Daniel Ricciardo after Ricciardo suffered a wrist injury in a crash in second practice at the Dutch Grand Prix, launching Lawson’s own F1 career. Three years later, at the same track, another driver’s wrist injury is putting him back in a Red Bull seat.
Tsunoda’s own path back is less about coincidence and more about a year spent waiting for exactly this kind of opening. He raced for Red Bull’s junior team from his 2021 debut through the transition from AlphaTauri to Racing Bulls, sharing a garage over the years with Pierre Gasly, Ricciardo, and Nyck de Vries. He finally earned his promotion to the senior Red Bull team early in 2025, replacing a struggling Lawson, only to lose the seat himself by year’s end when Hadjar’s form forced the team’s hand. Tsunoda was demoted back to Racing Bulls in favor of Hadjar and then off the grid entirely in favor of rookie Lindblad, left with nothing but a reserve role to show for a year that started with the biggest promotion of his career.
Watching from the sidelines
Tsunoda did not pretend the months on the sidelines were easy. “I was super… I don’t know if it’s frustrating or stressful,” he admitted. “But watching from the screen every race, I was feeling like I really want to be back and driving. I was training almost every day for a long time. During training, I had a lot of time to do it because I didn’t have anything to do other than that.”
That training now has to translate into a race weekend with almost no preparation time. Zandvoort is a Sprint weekend, which leaves Tsunoda with a single practice session before qualifying begins, and he has never driven this generation of car under the sport’s new regulations. He has logged laps in test and practice sessions across the year, including four Technical Practice Curriculum outings covering five full race distances, but none of it fully substitutes for a competitive session in the current machinery. “I’ve done four TPCs. Within that, I was doing five race distances. It’s pretty sharp,” Tsunoda said. “I think having one pre-practice with this would be a little bit tricky, but that’s why I’m not setting any expectations. For now, I just enjoy and just have fun, which I wanted to have for a long time.”
Rumors of an IndyCar future for Tsunoda had begun circulating in the weeks before Hadjar’s injury, with reports linking him to Meyer Shank Racing’s Honda-powered entry for 2027. Tsunoda has not ruled it out. Two years ago, discussing a demo run in a Honda IndyCar ahead of the Las Vegas Grand Prix, he admitted the category scared him. “For me, it’s scary. I can’t imagine myself driving more than two hours and being in that car,” he said at the time, before adding the line that now reads differently given this weekend’s turn of events: “For now, I am not really aiming or thinking about IndyCar, but yeah, why not in the future?”
A career built on other people’s misfortune
Tsunoda was careful to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth sitting underneath his excitement. Chances like this one rarely appear on merit alone. They appear when someone else gets hurt. “It always depends on the current drivers who are competing this year,” he said, a simple statement that covers both his own opportunity this weekend and the uncertainty hanging over whether it leads anywhere beyond it.
He is not the first driver to find his way back into a race seat this way, and the paddock has seen the pattern before. Oliver Bearman got his own F1 debut when he replaced an unwell Carlos Sainz at Ferrari at the 2024 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix weekend, a chance that turned into a permanent seat within a year. Whether Tsunoda’s cameo becomes anything more than a single weekend depends on factors well outside his control: how quickly Hadjar’s wrist heals, how Red Bull’s driver market shakes out for 2027, and whether this one Sprint weekend at Zandvoort is enough to remind the paddock what they lost when they let him go.
For now, none of that has dimmed what Tsunoda described as pure relief at simply being back in the car. Nine months of watching races from a screen ended with a phone call about another driver’s freak accident, and Tsunoda intends to enjoy every lap of the opportunity it handed him, however briefly it lasts.
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