Photo: Lukas Raich, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Isack Hadjar won’t be racing this weekend, and the fallout runs through two Red Bull-owned teams at once. The Frenchman picked up a wrist injury during the summer break — serious enough that Red Bull has ruled him out of the 2026 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, the round hosting Max Verstappen’s home race. Liam Lawson gets pulled up from Racing Bulls to cover the RB22 for the weekend, and Yuki Tsunoda, who has spent the back half of the year in a reserve role, steps back into a race seat to cover the vacancy Lawson leaves behind.
The Official Word
Red Bull’s statement kept things simple: Hadjar’s wrist injury happened during the summer shutdown, not during any on-track running, and it’s enough to keep him out of the car this weekend. Lawson takes over the RB22, and the team thanks him for stepping in on short notice while wishing Hadjar a speedy recovery. Racing Bulls followed with its own note, thanking both Lawson and Tsunoda for their flexibility as the two organizations rearrange their lineups on short notice, and adding its own well wishes for Hadjar.
Neither team has said how the injury happened, and there’s no reason to guess. What matters for this weekend is straightforward: one seat opens at the top team, and it triggers a second move one level down.
Why a Wrist Injury Is a Bigger Deal Than It Looks
A modern F1 steering wheel is closer to a cockpit control panel than a simple wheel — brake bias, differential settings, DRS, radio, and a half-dozen rotary dials all get worked by the same hands that are managing several hundred kilograms of downforce-assisted grip through Zandvoort’s banked corners. A wrist that can’t rotate cleanly or absorb load isn’t just a performance problem, it’s a control problem, which is exactly the kind of injury a team can’t quietly manage through a race weekend the way a driver might grind through a stiff neck or bruised ribs. Sitting Hadjar out is the conservative call, and the right one.
Lawson’s Second Chance
Lawson has been here before, briefly. He got a two-round audition at Red Bull to start the 2025 season before being swapped back to Racing Bulls, a quick call that looked brutal at the time given how little the team let him show. Since then, he’s rebuilt his case the hard way, running as the strongest midfield points-scorer among the teams outside the top three. This recall — even if it’s a single-weekend assignment rather than a contract change — puts him back in the senior car at the circuit hosting his old team’s biggest home race, and gives him a chance to close the loop on a story that started so briefly last year.
One Hour of Practice, Not Three
The timing makes the assignment harder than a normal call-up. Zandvoort’s 2026 date runs as a sprint weekend, which means Lawson gets a single hour of FP1 before the grid locks in for Saturday’s sprint — nothing like the three-practice cushion a driver would normally get to relearn a car’s brake-by-wire feel, differential mapping, and switch layout. It’s also the last Dutch Grand Prix on the calendar for now, adding a farewell-tour backdrop to what is otherwise a logistics headache for Red Bull’s engineers.
Tsunoda’s Boomerang, and Red Bull’s Deep Bench
Tsunoda’s route back to a race seat says as much about Red Bull’s driver program as Lawson’s does. He lost his own full-time seat at the end of last season and was moved into a test and reserve role covering both Red Bull and Racing Bulls — a landing spot that kept him inside the organization rather than out of it entirely, and one that’s fueled its own share of speculation about where he ends up long-term. Now he’s straight back on the grid at Racing Bulls, partnered with rookie Arvid Lindblad. The fact that Red Bull had a second race-proven driver sitting on the sideline, ready to slot in with no notice, is the real story here — most midfield teams don’t have that kind of depth to burn.
What It Costs Hadjar
Hadjar arrives at this weekend eighth in the championship, on the back of seven straight points finishes — a streak that ends here regardless of how Lawson performs, because zero points is zero points no matter the reason. It’s also a reminder that Red Bull’s 2026 season has already had more than its share of self-inflicted turbulence, and an injury-forced lineup change is one more variable the team didn’t need. Red Bull’s own language frames this as a one-weekend fix rather than a lineup change, but that’s also exactly what a team would say either way. The real answer depends on how fast that wrist heals, and how Lawson looks doing a job he last did under very different circumstances.
For one race weekend, Red Bull’s second car effectively has three drivers attached to it: the incumbent recovering, the stand-in racing, and the reserve filling in below him. That’s not a team scrambling — it’s the reserve system finally being used for what it’s actually there for.
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