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Red Bull RacingIsack Hadjar is a French Formula One driver racing for Red Bull alongside Max Verstappen in 2026. He made his debut with Racing Bulls in 2025, crashed on the formation lap of his first race, rebuilt the season, scored his first podium at the Dutch Grand Prix, outscored his teammate by thirteen points, and was promoted to the senior team. He is 21 years old, French by nationality, Algerian by heritage, and the first Arab driver in the history of Formula One.
| Full name | Isack Alexandre Hadjar |
| Date of birth | 28 September 2004 |
| Birthplace | Paris, France |
| Nationality | French / Algerian (dual citizenship) |
| Current team | Red Bull Racing |
| Car number | #6 |
| Father | Yassine Hadjar, quantum physicist |
| Mother | Randa Hadjar, HR director; his career manager |
| Nickname | Le Petit Prost |
Hadjar was born in Paris to an Algerian family with no background in motorsport and no inherited wealth to fund one. His father Yassine left Algeria for France at nineteen to study physics. He earned a PhD in quantum mechanics and became a researcher at the University of Technology of Troyes. His mother Randa also came from Algeria to France at nineteen, built a career in HR, and now manages her son's professional affairs. Isack has described their story in his own words: "My parents came to France alone at 19 and built everything they have through hard work."
There is no racing dynasty behind Hadjar. There is a physicist who served as his kart mechanic, who taught him to think about a racing car as a system of variables, and whose equations are painted on the back of his son's Formula One helmet.
When Isack was five, his father put him in a rental kart. He found it terrifying. Yassine waited two years, then signed him up for a course outside Paris: one session every other Sunday. The approach was measured, deliberately paced, consistent with how a scientist introduces a controlled experiment. By seven, Isack was competing in regional championships. He has not stopped since.
His original fascination with cars came not from watching Formula One but from the animated film Cars. He saw it and decided that was what he wanted to do. He was small enough that a cartoon character was still the reference point.
In 2019, Hadjar won the Trophée Winfield, the prestigious French young driver scholarship awarded at Circuit Paul Ricard. He described the experience as formative: the group environment, the shared car, the physical tests, the weight of every lap counting toward something. The prize is one of the oldest pathways from French karting into single-seater competition, and winning it placed him inside a network that mattered.
Hadjar competed in the Formula Regional European Championship in 2021, finishing fifth as a rookie with multiple victories. The result that changed the arc of his career came at Monaco, in the support race.
He won. He went back to the small apartment he had rented for the weekend with his then-manager. His trainer came in and told him that Helmut Marko wanted to meet him. He told the trainer to get lost. He was convinced it was a joke. It was not a joke. Marko had watched the race, noted the name, and made the call.
He met Marko. Red Bull announced in June 2021 that Hadjar would become a member of their junior team from 2022.
Hadjar's 2022 season was a dual programme: Formula Regional Asian Championship with Hitech (third in championship) and FIA Formula 3 with Hitech. He won four times in F3 and finished fourth. It was a credible season that confirmed the Monaco assessment without yet being decisive.
The 2023 Formula 2 season with Hitech was the difficult year in the career. He finished fourteenth. He was winless. There were question marks. He later acknowledged the struggle directly. The season did not end his Red Bull connection but it introduced the doubt that would follow him into 2024.
Hadjar moved to Campos Racing for 2024, pairing with fellow Red Bull junior Pepe Marti. His four wins all came in Feature Races, off merit, not reversed grids. He led the championship by 36 points at the summer break. He was the title favourite.
Then the second half of the season changed. Mechanical issues interrupted his momentum. His rival Gabriel Bortoleto closed the gap race by race. They arrived at Abu Dhabi for the season finale.
Hadjar needed only to avoid catastrophe. He stalled at the start of the Feature Race. Bortoleto finished second. Bortoleto won the championship. Hadjar finished the season as runner-up.
He said: "This is the worst moment of my life."
French motorsport media had given him the nickname "le Petit Prost" during the 2024 campaign, a reference to Alain Prost's famous analytical precision. Prost was "the Professor." Hadjar's calculated, measured approach to racing had earned him the same label. The title loss did not erase the season that produced it.
Hadjar's route to Racing Bulls was not entirely straightforward. His FP1 appearance for Red Bull at the British Grand Prix in 2024 was described in paddock reporting as underwhelming, leaving team insiders with a reluctance to promote him. His Racing Bulls seat for 2025 came partly from the winter restructuring that followed Sergio Perez's departure and the chain of decisions around Lawson and Tsunoda rather than from a clean performance-based selection process.
None of that was visible by the time he arrived in Melbourne for the 2025 Australian Grand Prix.
He qualified eleventh. He drove to the grid on the formation lap. The circuit was damp. He spun. He could not take the start of his debut Formula One race.
He walked back to the paddock. On that walk, Lewis Hamilton's father Anthony was there and consoled him. The father of the driver whose seven-year Mercedes tenure had shaped the modern era of the sport, offering support to the twenty-year-old now racing in the environment Hamilton had vacated. Hadjar later described the Melbourne experience as a "punch in the face" and said it proved something to himself about his own mental resilience.
The recovery from Australia was steady rather than spectacular. He scored points at subsequent rounds and settled into the Racing Bulls machinery. He was described by paddock observers as a qualifying specialist, a driver who found the limit of the car in short runs with unusual consistency. He reached Q3 at sixteen of the twenty-four races across the season. He fell out in Q1 only twice.
His teammate Liam Lawson, who had briefly held the Red Bull seat earlier in the season before his own demotion, was the comparison point. The two were closely matched for much of the year.
Before the season had begun, in pre-season media, Hadjar had said he would score a podium. It is the kind of statement that ages badly if it fails to materialise.
At the 2025 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, Hadjar qualified fourth. He drove a measured, controlled race and finished third. It was his first Formula One podium. It was the first Racing Bulls podium since 2021. He was the youngest Frenchman to stand on an F1 podium.
He had said it. Then he had done it.
Helmut Marko, who had seen hundreds of junior drivers come through the Red Bull programme and had made the phone call to Hadjar's apartment in Monaco four years earlier, described him as the surprise of the season.
Hadjar finished the 2025 season twelfth in the championship with 51 points. Lawson finished with 38. The thirteen-point margin across a full season in the same car was the direct evidence Red Bull needed.
In December 2025, Red Bull confirmed that Hadjar would replace Yuki Tsunoda at the senior team for 2026, partnering Max Verstappen. Tsunoda was retained as test and reserve driver. Hadjar had become Verstappen's fourth different teammate in thirteen months, after Perez, Lawson, and Tsunoda.
Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies said Hadjar had "displayed great maturity and proved to be a quick learner. Most importantly, he has demonstrated the raw speed that is the number one requirement in this sport."
Hadjar moved to England after the 2025 season ended and began embedding himself at Red Bull's Milton Keynes headquarters. He has been described as attending the factory every two days, studying the new 2026 car alongside its first-year Red Bull-Ford power unit with the same application he brings to debriefs.
He has stated publicly that Verstappen will initially be faster than him and that he is treating 2026 as a development year. This is not false modesty. Verstappen's recent teammates have either collapsed under the comparison (Perez, who earned 152 of Red Bull's 589 points in 2024), been demoted (Lawson, two races), or underperformed (Tsunoda, 31 points from 22 rounds). The job Hadjar is taking is widely considered the second most challenging seat in Formula One, behind only Verstappen's own.
He has pre-season tested with Red Bull at Bahrain, where a hydraulic issue cut his running short after a shakedown crash at Barcelona reduced early preparation. Mekies said the environment around Hadjar needs to be managed carefully to allow him to develop without the pressure becoming destructive.
Hadjar has said he is ready.
Hadjar races under a French flag. He holds dual French and Algerian citizenship. He is the first Arab driver in the history of Formula One and has spoken about what that means in specific terms: "I represent them now. I race under the French flag. But yeah, it's a first in Formula 1. I'm proud of that. I'll just try to do them proud."
The equations on the back of his helmet are not decorative. They are mathematical formulae, placed there as a direct tribute to his father. Every time he lines up on a Formula One grid, he carries Yassine Hadjar's field of work on the rear of the helmet between the peaks of his career and the equations his father spent a lifetime studying.
Hadjar practices judo whenever his schedule allows. He is a Paris Saint-Germain supporter. He is close personal friends with Fabio Quartararo, the MotoGP world champion. Between paddock commitments he follows football, MMA highlights, and junior category qualifying sessions on his phone. He has described himself as someone who hates repetition: "If you make me do the same thing 200 times, I lose my mind."
He has also described his on-track philosophy in a way that directly reflects his upbringing. He said: "I try to use my head. My dad is a quantum physicist who studied his whole life, I hope I've inherited some of his abilities. And I've learned that when I'm on track, I'm not just pushing the car, I'm the primary sensor my engineers rely on."
| Year | Series | Team | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | FIA Formula 2 | Hitech | 14th |
| 2024 | FIA Formula 2 | Campos | 2nd (runner-up) |
| 2025 | Formula One | Racing Bulls | 12th, 51 pts, 1 podium |
| 2026 | Formula One | Red Bull Racing | In progress |
Last updated March 2026
