Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies has gone to public lengths to insulate Isack Hadjar from any narrative that the rookie's place at the senior team is in question, after a Miami Grand Prix weekend that wrecked Saturday and Sunday in roughly equal measure.
The damage came in two stages. Post-qualifying scrutineering found Hadjar's floor was 2 millimetres outside the 2026 technical regulations, sending him from a competitive grid slot to a pit-lane start. Then, four laps into a recovery drive, the Frenchman tried to overtake aggressively and put his RB22 into the wall — ending his race on the spot and prompting a furious helmet-banging cockpit response that flooded social media within minutes.
Mekies' message has been a consistent one: this is a blip, not a turning point.
"I don't think we should qualify this as a worry," the team boss said. "We had a tough weekend. This has not helped our performance in terms of driving and in terms of rhythm. He still didn't get into the right rhythm. I think he would have been strong in the race and was strong for the little he could have shown. We're not worried."
Crucially, Mekies refused to lay any of it on Hadjar.
"We certainly didn't have a clean weekend," he said. "We didn't help him either by sending him from the back of the grid after our mistake with the legality of the car."
The disqualification has been one of the harder elements to explain externally because Max Verstappen, in the same specification of car, passed scrutiny without issue. Mekies' answer was procedural rather than technical.
"They were on the exact same spec. We made a mistake in EAC's car. It's very simple. The car was found to be 2 millimetres too wide. We should have spotted it earlier in our routine checks. We did not, and it's painful, but it's easy to fix."
The specific component, the team boss noted, was the FIA-mandated bargeboard — a compulsory regulatory item rather than a development part — meaning the corrective work is about checks and process, not aerodynamic concept.
Hadjar himself was unsparing in his own assessment to Sky Sports F1 after climbing out of the wrecked car.
"I was too eager and too excited about making moves and just ruined myself," he said. "It was easy to overtake and I should have been more cautious. There was no point trying to flirt with the limit in this corner. So, I'm really pissed off. It's the first time I really struggled with my overall pace. This is new and I really need to dig deep."
The last line is the one Red Bull will be tracking. Hadjar's first three rounds of 2026 were notable for how often the rookie had run close to Verstappen — at points uncomfortably close from the four-time world champion's perspective. Miami broke that thread. If Canada extends it, the conversation around the second Red Bull seat shifts in a way Mekies' current optimism cannot fully disarm.
For the moment, though, the team principal's framing is unchanged: a 2mm tolerance failure on a regulatory part, a single-driver crash on lap five, and a rookie whose job security at the most-watched team in the paddock has not, in his boss's reading, moved at all.
