Red Bull boss 'sad to lose' F1 star

Racing Bulls F1 team principal Alan Permane has revealed his sadness at losing Isack Hadjar ahead of the 2026 season.

Hadjar has been promoted up into a seat with the main Red Bull team after an impressive rookie season with sister team Racing Bulls.

In his rookie season, Hadjar claimed a maiden grand prix podium, and managed to finish above both Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda in the drivers' championship, despite the fact that he was the only one of the three not to race a Red Bull in 2025.

Tsunoda only managed to score 30 points across 22 grand prix weekends with the main team, and has dropped off the grid entirely now, with Arvid Lindblad taking Hadjar's place at Racing Bulls.

And Racing Bulls team principal Permane has revealed quite how much the team will miss Hadjar, while also congratulating the young Frenchman on his move up to be Max Verstappen's team-mate.

"Yeah, it’s been phenomenal," Permane told Motorsport Week about Hadjar's rookie season at his team. "We’ve seen him after, of course, the disaster of Melbourne and the huge upset that caused him, he bounced back almost immediately for that.

“He had an incredibly strong race in Japan, just two races afterwards, I think. And honestly, it was a little bit under the radar, but for me, that was where his season really, really started and he performed incredibly and he really got to grips with the car and understood how to make the car work in a track like Suzuka, which is, of course, not an easy track and he felt how physical it was as well. And then he’s gone from strength to strength.

"We can almost be assured that he’s going to hit Q3 each weekend when we get things right and have a decent race," Permane continued.

"So, yeah, we are, of course, sad to lose him, but at the same time very proud that he’s done a good enough job to move up to Red Bull."

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Can Hadjar challenge for the championship?

The new regulations mean that we're not too sure where Red Bull will be in the competitive pecking order in 2026, and their new era of power unit production also makes their performance hard to predict.

Either way, it's likely that Max Verstappen will still be able to pick up race victories and maybe throw himself into the mix for the championship, as he did in 2025 in an underperforming RB21.

For Hadjar to have any chance, he's going to need to be as close as possible to Verstappen in qualifying to give him the best possible chance to fight for podiums come race day.

That's something that Tsunoda failed to do time and time again in 2025, and that saw him finish down in 17th in the drivers' championship while Verstappen was two points away from championship success.

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