Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies has dismissed any suggestion of a wider concern about Isack Hadjar after a brutal Miami Grand Prix weekend that ended with the rookie disqualified from qualifying, sent to the back of the grid, and out of the race four laps in.
The Frenchman framed it as a one-off rather than a pattern, having watched Hadjar match Max Verstappen's pace closely over the opening three rounds of 2026.
"I don't think we should qualify this as a worry," Mekies said. "We had a tough weekend. This has not helped our performance in terms of driving and in terms of rhythm. He still didn't get into the right rhythm. I think he would have been strong in the race and was strong for the little he could have shown. We're not worried."
Hadjar's weekend collapsed before the lights even went out, when post-qualifying scrutineering found his car's floor protruded 2 millimetres beyond the dimensions allowed by the 2026 technical regulations. The rookie was disqualified and sent to start from the pit lane, with Verstappen — running the same specification — passing scrutiny because the offending part was correctly fitted on his side of the garage.
Mekies did not look for excuses, accepting full responsibility on Red Bull's behalf rather than pinning anything on the driver.
"We certainly didn't have a clean weekend," he said. "We didn't help him either by sending him from the back of the grid after our mistake with the legality of the car."
Pressed on how the same parts could pass on one car and fail on the other, Mekies pointed to a routine-checks failure rather than any setup or strategy split between the two RB22s.
"They were on the exact same spec. We made a mistake in EAC's car. It's very simple. The car was found to be 2 millimetres too wide. We should have spotted it earlier in our routine checks. We did not, and it's painful, but it's easy to fix."
The specific component, Mekies clarified, was the FIA-mandated bargeboard — a compulsory regulatory part rather than a development item — meaning the fix is procedural rather than aerodynamic.
For Hadjar, the recovery never materialised. Starting from the pit lane on a circuit notoriously difficult to overtake on, he tried to make up ground far too aggressively in the opening laps, going off chasing a move and putting the car into a wall on lap five. His on-track radio fury — captured by F1's broadcast feed and replayed widely — became one of the unintended highlights of the weekend.
The driver's own post-race assessment to Sky Sports F1 was unsparing.
"I was too eager and too excited about making moves and just ruined myself," Hadjar said. "It was easy to overtake and I should have been more cautious. There was no point trying to flirt with the limit in this corner. So, I'm really pissed off. It's the first time I really struggled with my overall pace. This is new and I really need to dig deep."
That last admission — that he genuinely struggled for outright pace, rather than only execution — is the line Red Bull will be quietly tracking. Mekies' broader message, though, is that the underlying performance trajectory of his rookie remains intact. Through the first three rounds, Hadjar was the closer of the two Red Bull drivers to Verstappen on more than one weekend; Miami, in the team's reading, broke that thread rather than redefined it.
With Canada up next — the kind of energy-poor, low-margin track at which Red Bull's revised RB22 still has plenty to prove — both Mekies and Hadjar arrive needing a clean weekend. The team boss insists the floor mistake is the easiest part of the equation to put right.
Source: newsformula.one