- Isack Hadjar said at the Mexico media day that “there’s stuff that I should have kept for myself” after his radio and clutch complaints about Red Bull in Austin, per Motorsport.com.
- He took back the tone and kept the argument: Hadjar says the team was “probably not open-minded enough to the one-stop strategy” and that the starts still go “a bit up and down”.
- Team principal Laurent Mekies says the radio problem should be fixed this year, while the start problem needs hardware changes that arrive in 2027.
A Red Bull Driver Walks Back the Tone and Keeps the Argument
“I didn’t really think,” Isack Hadjar said. “We need to be honest with ourselves as well, but there’s stuff that I should have kept for myself. I know that.”
The 22-year-old Frenchman said it at the media day in Mexico, when he was asked about what he told the cameras after the United States Grand Prix. He did not retreat from the substance. He accepted that he is entitled to speak his mind about the team. What he allowed is that he could have worded certain things differently.
The words he chose in Austin were sharp ones. To see why he now wants some of them back, start with his Sunday.
What Happened to Hadjar in Austin
Hadjar branded his Austin weekend a “disaster” before he recovered to qualify third, on the second row of the grid. Then the race began. He dropped places off the line with a poor start and finished sixth, one place behind Lando Norris and one ahead of Oscar Piastri.
His team radio gave him trouble as well, and after his pit stop he rejoined the track on the wrong setting. He laid out the afternoon in his post-race interview. “You know, I do everything perfectly in terms of procedure, and then I just have clutch over delivery,” he said. “These things are just out of my control.” He added that the problems had begun to anger him. Then he named the second issue. “I have poor radio coverage. I can’t hear what’s happening in the pits. I leave the pits with the wrong map.”
In the media pen on Sunday night he summed up the day. “At the moment, it’s the little things we can’t do,” Hadjar said. “I have poor radio, I don’t even know what’s happening. And whenever I drop the clutch, it’s going into a nightmare. If we fix these two issues, we might already be on the podium. It seems like we can do the hardest things, but we can’t do the silly things.”
He also said what he wanted done about the clutch. “It needs a redesign. That’s it,” Hadjar said, calling the part “too fragile”. He added: “It’s not coping well with temperatures.”
The Hardest Things, Already Done
When Hadjar talks about the hardest things, he means the climb Red Bull has made in 2026. In Australia, China and Japan the average deficit in race pace was 1.2 seconds per lap. Erasing a gap like that over a season is a big job, and Mekies has credited Max Verstappen’s technical feedback for Red Bull’s 2026 turnaround. Hadjar’s complaint about the silly things reads against that backdrop.
Verstappen finished third in Austin, yet there was little satisfaction in the Red Bull hospitality that evening. Several team members acknowledged in the paddock that Kimi Antonelli’s race pace was impossible to match, and both Red Bull drivers were frustrated that the team had not extracted the full potential of its package. Verstappen was unhappy with the decision to stay on the softer compounds while the harder ones seemed to work better, and the power unit behaved inconsistently.
What He Took Back, and What He Kept
In Mexico, Hadjar kept the point about strategy and sharpened it. Red Bull has analyzed the Texas weekend in detail, and the review found that the strategy could have been better.
“I think that, as a team, we were probably not open-minded enough to the one-stop strategy,” Hadjar said. “In a way, we were very convinced that the softer compound was working better. Maybe we thought the degradation was higher than it actually was and once you start with this, we put ourselves in a difficult situation.”
That situation led to a moment between the two Red Bull cars. The team asked Hadjar to let Verstappen through on the long straight toward Turn 12, and he did not do so immediately. It briefly frustrated Verstappen. Hadjar says the delay was not deliberate. “I had good pace on the soft, so I didn’t want to pit too early,” he said. The team did not want Verstappen to lose race time while he ran a different strategy, Hadjar explained, and he called the result confusing. “If we were all on the one-stop, everyone would have been happy,” he said. “That’s it.”
On the starts and the radio he softened a single word. “I wouldn’t say that the other things are silly things,” Hadjar said. “I would say they are important little things that we don’t do well.”
Mekies Answers: Fix the Radio, Wait on the Starts
The team principal heard the same complaints and split them in two. On the radio, Mekies sided with his driver. “We are all frustrated to struggle with radio issues for the second race in a row,” he said. “It’s making everyone’s lives very difficult, so it is true that it’s something that we would like to fix quite quickly.” Then he added: “So he’s right on that one.” Mekies wants the radio fixed before the end of this year.
The problem is not new, and it is not Hadjar’s alone. Austin was the first time it hit him this season, while Verstappen has met it more often. In Singapore his race engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, could not hear him, and the pair fell back on coded messages. That Singapore radio failure still ended in a Verstappen win. In Austin it was Verstappen who could not hear stand-in race engineer Tom Hart, who Mekies said did a great job. The team has not found the cause. “If we were understanding it, we would have solved it,” Mekies said. “We don’t fully understand why we are being hit by these issues.”
The starts get a longer answer and a less welcome one. Hadjar had said Red Bull needs to redesign the clutch, arguing that he follows every procedure and the clutch is still too sensitive. Mekies said the cause is wider than a single part. “The start performance is going across pretty much all departments of the company, probably except the aerodynamic department,” he said. “It’s engine, it’s gearbox, it’s clutch, it’s many things.”
A proper fix needs hardware changes to the interaction between clutch, gearbox, power unit and turbo, and those arrive next year. Mekies promised progress in the meantime. “I’m confident that we will continue to reduce the gap to the competition from now to the end of the year,” he said. He was equally direct about the limit: “I equally know that we will not be the benchmark before the end of the season.”
Sister team Racing Bulls has made better starts on average, and Red Bull is looking at that comparison. Verstappen has said the equipment is identical and that the difference comes down to procedure.
Hadjar has accepted the schedule. “We keep pushing on that end,” he said. “It’s definitely been a big improvement if you look at the first couple of races of the year. Now we’re at a point where it goes a bit up and down. We’re aware of that and we need to work with what we have until the end of the year.”
A 22-Year-Old With Opinions and a Contract
Not everyone outside the garage liked the tone. Former F1 driver Ralf Schumacher, speaking on the Backstage Boxengasse podcast, said: “I wouldn’t exactly call it a lack of decency, but it is not behaviour that you should display in this way.” He went on to say that “it is a shame that Dr Helmut Marko is no longer at the team”, and that he believes Marko would have drawn a line.
Hadjar joined the senior team for 2026 after one full season at Racing Bulls, where he took a maiden podium at the Dutch Grand Prix. Red Bull confirmed on December 2, 2025 that he would replace Yuki Tsunoda alongside Verstappen, and Mekies said then that Hadjar had shown the raw speed that is the first requirement in the sport. Hadjar later missed three rounds with a wrist injury, and in September he signed a Red Bull extension that keeps him with the team for 2027.
A driver with that record, in his second season and with a contract in hand, has earned a say. The Mexico media day shows he also knows when to stop. He did not say which of his words he regrets, and he held on to the points Red Bull itself has now backed: the strategy needed a second look, the radio needs fixing, and the starts need changes that cannot be made this year.
The Next Test Is in Mexico
That test comes at the Mexico City Grand Prix, with the race on November 1. Hadjar will find out quickly whether the radio holds, and the start will give him a second chance to show that the progress he describes is real. If they go well, the silly things will look smaller. If they do not, he will be asked the same questions again, and he has already said which answers he stands behind.
