Isack Hadjar’s Spin, a Difficult Car, and the Growing Pains of a Red Bull Debut

Isack Hadjar’s second race weekend for Red Bull told a story that the championship table only half captures: eighth place earned through persistence against a car that was working against him from the first corner.



The Frenchman qualified ninth for Sunday’s race, which was a respectable effort given the RB22’s broader struggles throughout the Shanghai weekend.



But the grand prix itself began catastrophically, with Hadjar spinning through the long right-hander at Turn 13 on the opening lap and nearly collecting Oliver Bearman in the process.



“The car was just super hard to drive today, a lot more than it was the last two days,” Hadjar told media after the race.



“It just caught me off guard on lap one, and even the whole race, I was just fighting with it.”



His description of the spin was striking in how little warning he had before the car snapped away from him: “It was just very instantaneous, the way the car snapped out from me. I didn’t have time to have an input on that. The thing just spun out and I was done.”



A slow pit stop added further frustration during what was already a compromised afternoon, though Hadjar suggested the time lost probably did not change the final result.



He was the only Red Bull driver to score points after Max Verstappen retired with a coolant fault while running sixth, which made Hadjar’s recovery to eighth feel more significant in hindsight.



The result gave him four points from the opening two weekends, which is a modest but real return given that he also suffered a reliability retirement in Melbourne on his Red Bull debut.



Red Bull boss Laurent Mekies acknowledged the scale of the challenge his team faces, saying after the race that “performance-wise, our package showed some significant shortcomings.”



The team’s 12-point return from the first two race weekends is their worst at this stage of a season since 2015, and the gap to the front is not small.



Hadjar also offered measured criticism of the new regulations, describing qualifying under the 2026 rules as “a bit of the worst part,” with the required lift-and-coast sections frustrating drivers who want to be accelerating through the final sector.



“I just think that a race car should be reaching its top speed at the end of the straights,” he noted, a view shared by several of his peers.



Mekies pointed to the five-week gap before Suzuka following the cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi rounds as a window for meaningful development work back in Milton Keynes.



For Hadjar personally, the challenge is to demonstrate what his talent can produce when the machinery is more cooperative, a question that remains open for now.
The post Isack Hadjar’s Spin, a Difficult Car, and the Growing Pains of a Red Bull Debut appeared first on Formula1News.co.uk .