With Silverstone set to roar this weekend, Octane enjoyed an exclusive pre-race interview with the Oracle Red Bull Racing hotshoe
This rising young star of F1 is impossibly fresh-faced for the age of 21 and after 14 years of racing since lift-off in karts, but he is also modest and polite and friendly, if not overly talkative. That’s not going to be an issue because, at the door, I am warned that I have only ten minutes with Isack Hadjar, a driver who, after a cringingly embarrassing start to his F1 career (crashing out on a damp formation lap in Australia in 2025), is this year making his mark at Oracle Red Bull Racing. Big time. This season the French Algerian has been consciously letting it be known via his exploits behind the wheel that should the team talisman ever make good on his oft-repeated threat to walk away from F1, he is more than ready to fill Max’s shoes.
Hadjar’s rise has not been meteoric so much as meticulously managed. He has raced at every level on the way up, but progressed pretty much every season until he became the final rookie to be announced for the 2025 season, picking up the vacant seat at Racing Bulls. He took his maiden podium at Zandvoort and outscored Liam Lawson to earn promotion to Oracle Red Bull Racing for 2026 alongside four times drivers’ world champion Max Verstappen after Yuki Tsunoda’s departure.
The team’s faith has been paid back with interest as, in the first seven races of the season, he has already scored more points than Verstappen’s team-mates managed all year in 2025 and has seemingly shaken off the so-called Red Bull second-seat curse.
The setting for our meeting is a magnificent, refurbished Georgian townhouse, less than a minute’s walk from bustling South Kensington underground station, a place that is home to so many French people – Kensington is dubbed the ‘21st Arrondissement’ and would be a mid-sized city of 150,000 French inhabitants were it transplanted across the Channel – that the Paris-born racer could speak in his native tongue and stand a pretty good chance of being understood. Not that that matters because he is whisked into and out of the building in near-Presidential fashion. And he speaks perfect English, anyway.
Isack – I’ve now shaken his hand, and have therefore decided unilaterally to be on first-name terms with him even if such overfamiliarity is not reciprocated – is in the UK for this weekend’s British Grand Prix, obviously, and he is in this building, along with rising star Megan Bruce, as the special guest while Oracle Red Bull Racing sponsor TAG Heuer launches its new TAG Heuer Formula 1 Chronograph x Gulf. The irritating ‘x’ means collaboration, of course, and must just be accepted as the way of the world now. The watch itself is pretty nice, it must be said, and the company has put on a tasteful and thoughtful display that celebrates its ties with motorsport going right back to Jack Heuer in the 1960s. Admittedly the touchpoints are pretty big bullseyes to hit – Heuer, McQueen, Verstappen – but scattered around the room in display cases are everything from a Gulf Heuer Monaco to a rather less obvious Cavallino miniature helmet clock, plus a Gulf fuel pump, some racesuits and more. All in all, it’s pretty cool.
Later there will be a brief panel discussion hosted by Jason Barlow with Megan, Isack and TAG Heuer’s Heritage Director Nicholas Biebuyck, but as the early-evening drinks flow and the influencers mingle, the privileged few (literally three of us) are spirited out of the room in turn and at intervals for our facetime with Isack. One UK PR person collects me and hands me over to another, who then hands me over to a French-Swiss colleague. In the room are four more TAG Heuer people, a large round table and the driver, wearing his branded togs, natch. As I settle down, initially he just stands there, seeming distracted as if he hasn’t even noticed my presence or been warned a journalist is coming. And then, as if an alarm has gone off, he snaps out of it, sits, smiles, five reds, out, and we are off…
Perhaps unusually, his route to racing came via an animated movie, Cars. His parents had ‘zero’ interest in motoring history, though his quantum mechanics father drove fast and sometimes karted. Yet Isack’s career path was determined by Lightning McQueen: ‘Lightning McQueen was everything. Speed. It was just about speed at first and not about Formula 1, it was about cars. And just cars in general. Like, as a kid, I would see a Ferrari in the street, I’d be like, “Yeah, okay!” So it wasn’t about Formula 1 at first, it was about cars and going fast. That’s what really got me.’
That changed when he watched Manish Pandey and Asif Kapadia’s 2010 Senna documentary. ‘I was just young and that’s when I entered a new world. I was like, “Wow”. And F1 was sometimes on Sunday in the background on the TV, and after watching that documentary, I was, like, really into Formula 1.’
His progress since has been relentless, only once spending two seasons in the same formula rather than progressing to the next: ‘Only once did I do the same thing twice – F2 – and even then the car completely changed between both seasons, so I never got to use my experience to apply it. So it was always about adapting every year. Even in Formula 1 now, we have completely changed the regulations. So next year is actually going to be the first time I do the same thing twice, staying in the same team.’ Ah, the regulations, is he a fan? ‘No’. Care to expand: ‘No, I don’t like them. Too much.’ OK, not so forthcoming so time for an old journo trick, despite the fast-ticking clock, stay silent, people can’t stand a vacuum, they always fill it.
And he does: ‘I think qualifying’s been a bit unfair in a way that sometimes you feel like you’re on an awesome lap, and you spend too much of your budget, and you pay it back in the straight line, and it’s not nice. Ideally you want to reach your top speed when you’re about to brake, and not halfway down the straight. And I think also, within what we can do as a team, sometimes we’re not delivering the best of the deployment because there’s a few issues, and so we’re still in a calibration phase. And as a driver, I’m ready to deliver, but the car is not.’
More silence. It works again. ‘I think on the engine side, I’ve been a bit unlucky. Whether they’re talking reliability or pure performance, I think there’s been a few things that were completely out of my control that prevent me from starting some races further up the grid and having better results. But even like that, I’m pleased with how I compare myself against Max, you know? I think pace-wise, I’ve been okay. I think he’s been incredibly strong in the races. I think I’m learning a lot on my racecraft, how to catch up a bit.’
Max. From the moment Isack first sat in a Racing Bull, he set his sights on promotion to the number two seat beside Verstappen in the full-fat Oracle Red Bull Racing team. That may sound weird for someone so clearly ambitious, but it is all part of the plan: ‘I mean, I’m ready for the challenge, but I love having a team-mate that’s constantly setting the bar super, super high. It’s just unbelievable.’
The iPhone tells me it has been recording for over eight minutes; time to step up the pace.
Heroes? Senna is number one, of course, but that is surely a little awkward for someone who has been nicknamed ‘Le Petit Prost’ in his homeland? ‘I mean, when you look at the Senna documentary, Prost is in the documentary. Of course, yes. And he doesn’t come out of it too well. So growing up, I was, like, unsure. But then as you grow up and you realise what he has achieved, and also how the media turned the story around as well, you realise how great he was. And it’s an honour for me to, you know, have him in my contacts and I have given him one of my helmets.’
Lewis Hamilton, champion pretty much permanently when Isack was rising through the childhood ranks, is rated highly, too: ‘I think when I look at all the champions, they’ve always been ready to do anything to win, even being dirty. He wasn’t. I think he was very fair, the way he won his World Championships. And that’s what I liked about him. I like his racecraft, how he prepared his races. I think in his approach, he was the smartest. So I liked him for that. He was spectacular every time he was out on track.’
Does that sense of fairplay really matter to him, I mean he seems pretty chill for an F1 driver, especially a young gun on the way up? ‘Actually, when I feel like I’m not talented at something, I’m absolutely not competitive. But when I feel like I’ve got this and I can learn fast, then I’m, I’m a sore loser, like, yeah, I am.’
But it must be odd racing against his childhood hero. ‘I’m aware it’s, uh, it’s him, but to be fair, I, because I’ve been watching him so much as a kid, I actually know how, I know his patterns and how he drives. It’s kind of, kind of helpful, but, um, yeah, so far I’ve, uh, mostly lost the fights to him, but I’m learning still.’
Road cars? A 911 GT2 RS MR – ‘The car I always wanted to have’ – and a Smart for Paris: ‘It’s so small that I park it sideways.’
Which gets him more excited? A great race, a single perfect lap, or just knowing he’s left it all out on the track? ‘A solid lap is, like, a lap where you’re like, “Yeah, I extracted the most out of the grip”.’
Are there any tracks that don’t exist anymore that he’s really want to drive? ‘Hockenheim. I never got to drive there in my career. And I think I drove it a lot on the sim as a kid. I really like it, so I think it’s a bit of a shame it’s gone.’
What about an older F1 car he’d love to drive? ‘As a Senna fan, his first World Championship-winning car, so the 1988 McLaren. And the last Championship-winning car of Michael Schumacher, the 2004 car, the year I was born.’
I am just starting to process how old I was in 2004 when that’s it, a PR person steps in, time’s up, 10min 40sec precisely… but then you would expect TAG Heuer to be pretty accurate with its timing.
Thanks to TAG Heuer for arranging this interview
