Starting from third position in Austin, Texas, Isack Hadjar had to settle for sixth place at the finish after a race marked by several problems.
After a difficult start to the weekend, Isack Hadjar bounced back in the best possible way, placing his Red Bull RB22 on the second row of the grid for the United States Grand Prix. The French driver could legitimately have hoped for a podium finish on the American circuit, but another problem at the start, this time with the clutch, robbed him of all the benefits of his excellent Saturday.
“The start was already bad. I did everything on my end, the procedure was good, I prepared well for it, but there was a clutch problem. It didn’t fail. We really need to redesign our parts because it’s becoming quite annoying not knowing what’s going to happen at every start,” he explained to our colleagues at Canal+.
Despite a difficult start to the race, Hadjar managed to challenge Kimi Antonelli at the end of the first stint, staying out on track for a long time on his soft tires. This was a very positive point that the young Parisian wants to remember, even if the rest of his race proved more challenging.
“I can take some positives from this because I worked very hard on my race pace, and I showed that today. I was very comfortable on the soft tires, I was able to push them for a long time. The car was performing really well apart from the electronic issues; everything else was positive.”
These electronic problems resurfaced after Isack Hadjar’s pit stop. The Frenchman was stuck on an engine map designed for pit stops, which turned his accelerator pedal into a switch. This made the end of the race particularly difficult, even though he managed to weather the storm and maintain a respectable pace until crossing the finish line in sixth position.
“Afterwards, in the pits, we were stuck with a bad pedal mapping. On the accelerator, when I was driving, I was either at 100% and when I was at 50% of the race there was still nothing. It was either 100% or 0%. It was undrivable, but even so we weren’t doing too badly. It’s such a shame to throw away a podium finish like that.”
Understandably annoyed, Hadjar nevertheless maintains a positive outlook; without a bad start, a podium finish was still possible: «
In a world where we can regulate our starts, I think we can have a superb race.
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