{"id":191759,"date":"2025-12-19T12:52:21","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T12:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/191759\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T12:52:21","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T12:52:21","slug":"hadjar-impressed-red-bull-but-lawson-showed-he-deserves-a-proper-chance-%c2%b7-racefans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/191759\/","title":{"rendered":"Hadjar impressed Red Bull but Lawson showed he deserves a proper chance \u00b7 RaceFans"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Isack Hadjar<\/a> landed the chance to replace Liam Lawson in Racing Bulls\u2019 driver line-up for 2025, he must have hoped he would do the same again a year later by moving up into the senior Red Bull squad.<\/p>\n

He surely did not expect that, within just three rounds, he and Lawson would become team mates after Yuki Tsunoda<\/a> was abruptly promoted to the top team.<\/p>\n

Besides losing the more experienced head of Tsunoda alongside him, the change affected Hadjar little, though it clearly knocked Lawson sideways. On top of the blow to his confidence, he now had to adapt to a different car, albeit one closely related to the chassis he drove the year before.<\/p>\n

Lawson\u2019s progress over the season is easy to track from the gap between him and Hadjar in qualifying. It took until around the Austrian Grand Prix for him to gel with the car, and by the end of the year there was often little to choose between the two drivers over a single flying lap.<\/p>\n

That contrasts sharply with Lawson\u2019s experience at Red Bull, where he was a second off Verstappen on his debut and seven-tenths down in his second and final appearance. Will Hadjar fare better \u2013 and will he get more than two opportunities to prove himself?<\/p>\n

Lawson surely deserved better than to be cast aside so quickly particularly given that, unlike Hadjar, he hadn\u2019t completed a full season of F1 before his promotion to Red Bull. But there\u2019s no ignoring the fact Hadjar had the beating of him over their time together and produced some notably impressive performances.<\/p>\n

Hadjar\u2019s third place at Zandvoort naturally stands out as the pick of the lot. This was no fluke result: he qualified fourth on merit and gained only one position through fortune, when Lando Norris<\/a> retired late in the race.<\/p>\n

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The knowledge such performances were occasionally possible clearly aggravated Hadjar on occasions where he came up short in qualifying. Sometimes this was despite the fact he\u2019d reached Q3 \u2013 as in Baku and Singapore \u2013 though in Austin he crashed out in Q1.<\/p>\n

Lawson also got his car in among the front-runners, holding Tsunoda\u2019s Red Bull back for fifth place in Baku. Over the second half of the season it was pretty much a toss-up which of the two Racing Bulls drivers would take the chequered flag first.<\/p>\n

It now falls to Hadjar to see if he can make better sense of Red Bull\u2019s second car than his three predecessors did. It won\u2019t have escaped his attention that Tsunoda ended the year behind both Racing Bulls drivers in the championship, which illustrates the scale of challenge he faces.<\/p>\n

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Unrepresentative comparisons omitted. Negative value: Hadjar was faster; Positive value: Lawson was faster<\/p>\n

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Formula 1
\nBrowse all Formula 1 articles<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Isack Hadjar landed the chance to replace Liam Lawson in Racing Bulls\u2019 driver line-up for 2025, he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[20115,5704,111,139,69,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-191759","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-isack-hadjar","9":"tag-liam-lawson","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}