Isack Hadjar admits after criticising Red Bull: "There's stuff that I should have kept for myself"

After the United States Grand Prix, Isack Hadjar was critical of Red Bull’s execution, as was Max Verstappen. Both drivers were unhappy with the strategy and, on top of that, were hampered by two problems that have been troubling the Formula 1 team for a long time: technical issues with the team radio and problematic starts.

“I have poor radio, I don’t even know what’s happening. And whenever I drop the clutch, it’s going into a nightmare,” Hadjar said in the media pen on Sunday night. “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.”

When asked about those comments during the media day in Mexico, Hadjar acknowledged that he is perfectly entitled to speak his mind about the team – which is, after all, exactly what Red Bull wants: drivers with character and opinions of their own – but that he perhaps could have worded certain things a little differently.

“I didn’t really think,” he said. “We need to be honest with ourselves as well, but there’s stuff that I should have kept for myself. I know that.”

Since then, Red Bull has analysed the race weekend in Texas in detail which revealed that the strategy could indeed have been better, something Hadjar explained further in Mexico.

“I think that, as a team, we were probably not open-minded enough to the one-stop strategy,” the Frenchman said when asked about the main lessons from Austin by Motorsport.com.

“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.”

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, Isack Hadjar, Red Bull Racing

That difficult situation led, among other things, to the misunderstanding when Hadjar was supposed to let Verstappen through. The Frenchman did not do so immediately on the long straight towards Turn 12, as the team had asked him to. It briefly caused frustration for Verstappen, but Hadjar clarified that it was not deliberate. It was simply linked to the lack of clarity surrounding the strategy.

“I had good pace on the soft, so I didn’t want to pit too early. At the same time, we don’t want Max to lose race time because he’s on another strategy,” he said. “In the end, that was confusing because if we were all on the one-stop, everyone would have been happy. That’s it.”

Although this lesson can already be taken on board for the remaining race weekends of 2026, Hadjar knows that he simply has to live with some of Red Bull’s other limitations.

Team principal Laurent Mekies has explained that fully resolving the start problem requires hardware changes that cannot be made this year.

“We keep pushing on that end,” Hadjar said when asked by Motorsport.com about the inconsistent starts.

“It’s something we’ve been working on. 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.

“But the good thing is the tough things, going fast on track, we are already doing that. We move forward. And I wouldn’t say that the other things are silly things. I would say they are important little things that we don’t do well. That’s it.”
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