A training injury, two weeks before Monza
Isack Hadjar hurt his wrist in routine training. That is enough to keep him out of the car at Zandvoort this weekend.
Red Bull have said nothing official. Sky Sports News reported on Wednesday morning that the Frenchman is highly unlikely to be fit for the first race after Formula 1’s summer break, which happens to be a Sprint weekend. Track action begins on Friday.
Hadjar turns his attention to the Italian Grand Prix at Monza instead, from September 4 to 6. Two extra weeks of recovery should be plenty for a 21-year-old.
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Lawson gets the seat back
No replacement has been confirmed either, but the expectation in the paddock points to Liam Lawson. The New Zealander would move up from Racing Bulls to sit alongside Max Verstappen, the same seat he occupied for two races at the start of 2025 before the team pulled him out of it.
That decision was brutal. Lawson had been handed Sergio Perez’s drive over the winter, then lost it after Australia and China. Yuki Tsunoda went the other way and spent the rest of that season next to Verstappen without doing enough to keep the job.
Tsunoda now looks set to slot back into the Racing Bulls car alongside Arvid Lindblad. At 26, and without a full-time drive lined up for 2027, a weekend at Zandvoort is a shop window he cannot afford to waste.
A season neither Red Bull driver has enjoyed
Eleven of the 23 rounds are done. Hadjar sits eighth in the drivers’ standings, 41 points adrift of Verstappen in sixth, and neither has found much in a car that has fought them all year.
None of that has damaged Hadjar’s standing at the team. He arrived after a rookie season at Racing Bulls that impressed enough people to earn the promotion, and he is expected to line up next to Verstappen again next year. Missing a Sprint weekend costs him in the points column rather than in the pecking order.
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