MIAMI, May 6, 2026, 07:15 EDT
Red Bull said it was not worried about Isack Hadjar after his Miami Grand Prix weekend unraveled with a qualifying disqualification and an early crash, with team principal Laurent Mekies casting the episode as a messy outlier rather than a driver crisis.
The timing is awkward. Red Bull brought major upgrades to Miami and finally saw cleaner signs from the RB22, its 2026 car, with Mekies calling the step “definite” while Max Verstappen qualified on the front row and finished fifth after a first-lap spin. Formula 1® – The Official F1® Website
That matters because Red Bull is trying to re-enter a front fight now led by Mercedes and pressured by McLaren. Kimi Antonelli won the Miami Grand Prix for Mercedes, with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri second and third for McLaren, leaving Verstappen fifth and Hadjar with no finish.
Hadjar’s trouble began before the race. He had qualified ninth, but stewards excluded him after the left and right floorboards on his Red Bull were found to protrude 2 millimetres outside the permitted reference volume; later changes under parc ferme, the locked-down period after qualifying when teams cannot freely alter cars, sent him to a pit-lane start.
Red Bull accepted the penalty. Mekies said the team “made a mistake” and that no performance gain was intended, while the governing FIA’s decision moved Hadjar to the back and reshuffled the lower end of the top 10. Reuters
The race gave him only a brief chance to repair the weekend. Hadjar made early gains from the pit lane before clipping the kerb, breaking his front suspension and hitting the wall on Lap 6, a crash that brought out the Safety Car, the vehicle used to slow the field after an incident.
“This one really hurts,” Hadjar said after the retirement, adding that he had “such good pace” before throwing away a possible points finish. He later called it a “very silly mistake,” a blunt self-assessment from a 21-year-old driver still trying to settle beside Verstappen. Formula 1® – The Official F1® Website
Mekies’ defence of Hadjar was just as direct. He said Red Bull “didn’t help him” by sending him from the back after its own legality error and added there was “every indication” Hadjar would have the right speed again in Montreal. Motorsport
There was also a performance caveat. Mekies told Sky Sports F1 that Hadjar had a straight-line performance deficit for much of the weekend, meaning the car was slower on the straights, and said the team had not done everything perfectly on its side.
Verstappen’s side of the garage made the story harder to ignore. He said after qualifying that there was “light at the end of the tunnel” and that the car felt more under his control after Red Bull’s upgrades, a signal that the car may now be moving toward the sharper platform he prefers. Sky Sports
The risk for Red Bull is that Miami is not just a bad weekend for Hadjar, but the first sign of a widening internal gap as the car improves around Verstappen. Sky’s upgrade analysis said Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull all came out of Miami with fresh development questions, and McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said execution and adaptation would matter as much as raw parts.
Jenson Button, the former world champion and Sky Sports pundit, backed Hadjar to recover, calling it “one race” and pointing to his rebound from an early crash in Australia last season. Canada, the next race weekend on May 22-24, will show whether Red Bull’s line holds: bad weekend, easy fix, no panic. Sky Sports
