Red Bull concedes ‘we didn’t give Hadjar a chance’ with ‘horrific’ Singapore GP

SINGAPORE – Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies has conceded the F1 Singapore Grand Prix weekend was a “nightmare” for Isack Hadjar with repeated reliability issues.

Hadjar managed to salvage a point for finishing in 10th place on Sunday, a result that should earn high praise given the difficulties faced across the event.

Isack Hadjar suffers “horrific weekend” in Singapore

If Hadjar had any luck in Singapore, then it was bad luck.

Run to the alternate sprint format, the Frenchman was eighth fastest in the sole practice session and secured a top 10 starting position for the sprint race.

But a power unit failure put him out of the sprint race after two laps, before a gearbox problem saw him fail to set a time in qualifying.

In the sister car, Max Verstappen enjoyed a clean sweep of pole and the race win in both the Sprint and the Grand Prix.

“We had a pretty horrific weekend on Isack’s side of the garage,” conceded Mekies.

“We basically didn’t give him any chance to do any competitive laps before the main race on Sunday.

“We had a number of different mechanical issues, some on the PU, some on the gearbox, some other glitches, so it was really like a nightmare weekend.”

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Paying tribute to the full team that had come together to get Hadjar on the track for qualifying, Mekies added: “In that context, the crew, not only Isack’s crew, but it also was fully involving Max’s crew, who helped the other side of the garage, under the car changing massive components all weekend long, up to Sunday morning in parc ferme before the race start, which is probably not what you want on the last of the triple header in hot and humid weather.

“So huge massive congrats to the crew for what they’ve done.

“I’ve never seen such an incredible turnaround and then deliver a faultless race car on Sunday.”

Reflecting that there was no negative judgement on Hadjar’s performance through problems beyond his control, Mekies said: “We have lost the chance to see Isack’s speed here, so we owe him one.

“In the race, starting last and spending 90 per cent of the race in traffic, he still showed very strong pace, which only confirmed that he would probably have been up there on the sharp end of the classification.

“So it’s on us, but he certainly has shown us that he had the speed with the laps he did on Sunday.”

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

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