Red Bull Racing confirmed on Wednesday morning in Baku that Isack Hadjar will stay in the second car for 2027. Ordinary sentence, odd timing: the announcement arrived a day before first practice at the Baku City Circuit, and Hadjar has not raced a Formula 1 car since Hungary on 26 July. A training accident over the summer left him with a fractured wrist and triggered a three-team driver reshuffle that ran from Zandvoort to Madrid.
Which means Red Bull committed to the comeback before watching it. For a team that has historically treated the seat beside Max Verstappen as short-term accommodation — Pierre Gasly benched midway through 2019, Alexander Albon dropped after 2020, Sergio Perez eventually released, Liam Lawson replaced after two races in 2025, Yuki Tsunoda moved aside for this season — that is the actual news. Not the deal. The willingness to sign it while the driver was still in rehab.
The head-to-head the announcement skipped
Official standings are unsentimental. Across the eleven grands prix Hadjar has started in 2026, Verstappen has scored 109 points to Hadjar’s 71. Hadjar has out-scored him on three weekends — China, Monaco and Great Britain — and on all three, Verstappen retired. In the six races where both Red Bulls reached the flag, at Suzuka, Montreal, Barcelona, the Red Bull Ring, Spa and the Hungaroring, Verstappen finished ahead every time.
That is the honest version of the broken-curse story. Eleven starts in, Hadjar has not yet beaten his team mate in a straight fight. What he has done instead is show up: eight points finishes from eleven starts, seven of them inside the top six, including seven consecutive top-six results from Canada to Hungary, plus a Monaco podium collected on a weekend when Verstappen did not complete a lap. He is eighth in the championship on 71 points, 74 behind Verstappen — and 36 of those 74 were scored in the three races he was not in.
Why that record still earns a contract
Because the job description changed. Red Bull are fourth in the constructors’ championship on 230 points after fourteen rounds and have not won a race. Verstappen, signed through 2030, has not won one either, and the team have not gone an entire season without a victory since 2015. In that environment the second car is not there to beat the first one. It is there to bank constructors’ points and feed the factory a second reliable stream of data.
On that measure Hadjar is comfortably doing the job. His 71 points are 31 percent of Red Bull’s total, gathered in eleven of fourteen rounds, an average of 6.5 per start. Lawson, handed the same car for Zandvoort, Monza and Madrid, scored 14, or 4.7 per start. That is no humiliation for Lawson, whose three-race stand-in stint ended with sixth at the Madring. But 1.8 points a race, spread across a full season, is precisely the currency that decides fourth place in a championship that pays out by position.
There is also a technical reason continuity is worth more to Red Bull this year than it would normally be. Red Bull Ford Powertrains built what the FIA’s own assessment ranked as the benchmark internal combustion engine of the 2026 reset, which sounds like a compliment and functions like a cage: no measured deficit means no relief under the Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities mechanism, and having missed the first two review windows, the team are locked out of engine relief for the rest of 2026. Power units were homologated on 1 March and are frozen. Every remaining gain has to come out of the chassis, the aerodynamics, the energy management and the two people driving. Teams in that position do not gamble on the second seat.
A healing wrist, and a strange place to restart
Hadjar has been straightforward about the injury in Baku: a small fracture on the outside of the wrist, no surgery required, roughly six weeks of natural healing, a simulator run as the final sign-off, and an expectation that it will keep hurting for a while. Now look at where he is restarting. The Baku City Circuit is 6.003 km of wall-lined street layout, 51 laps, with something close to two kilometres of full throttle along the seafront and a narrow castle section where one misjudged wheel ends the afternoon.
The mechanics of the place cut both ways for a healing joint. Most of Baku’s corners are low-speed right angles, so sustained steering load is lower than at Barcelona or Suzuka. What Baku does serve up is bumps, aggressive kerbs and hundreds of small corrections a lap, which are exactly the inputs a repaired wrist notices. Under the 2026 power unit rules, with the MGU-H gone and the hybrid split pushed toward an even share of combustion and electric power, that long straight is now a deployment problem as much as a top-speed run, which rewards a driver thinking his way around rather than muscling it. The calendar is less accommodating: Baku runs Thursday to Saturday this year, so practice opens on Thursday and the grand prix is on Saturday. No spare day to find the wrist’s limit.
The knock-on: Racing Bulls is now the interesting room
With Verstappen contracted to 2030 and Hadjar to 2027, Red Bull’s senior line-up is shut, and the pressure drops one rung down the building. Lawson has now covered the senior car twice, for the opening two rounds of 2025 and three rounds this summer, without ever getting a clean run at it, and sits ninth on 59 points. Arvid Lindblad has 31 in a rookie season. Tsunoda has one. There is no promotion slot left in this family for at least another year, which makes Racing Bulls’ 2027 announcements the genuinely unresolved question in the Red Bull camp.
One more piece of context for anyone who sat through the 2024 Formula 2 title fight: Gabriel Bortoleto, the driver who beat Hadjar to that championship, has ten points for Audi this season. Junior titles are a lottery ticket. Seats are the prize.
What to watch on Saturday
Three things. The qualifying gap comes first: how close Hadjar runs to Verstappen on Friday after two months out of a car will tell you more about this extension than the race result will. Second, the sprint record. Four sprint races this year, zero sprint points, is the one line on his 2026 sheet that has not improved, and while Baku is not a sprint weekend, it is obvious 2027 homework. Third, the drought. Fifty-one laps on a circuit where outright car performance counts for slightly less than usual, with a recovered Verstappen and a team mate who has just been told he is staying, is about as good a chance at a first 2026 win as Red Bull have left.
Red Bull’s last few decisions about that second car took most of a season each and ended with someone being moved on. This one took eleven races and a fractured wrist and ended with a contract. Hadjar’s own summary in Baku was the least Red Bull sentence anyone has produced about the seat in years: “If you’re good, you stay, and that’s it.” He turns 22 two days after the race.
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