Isack Hadjar has issued Red Bull a damning assessment of its RB22 after Sprint Qualifying for the Formula 1 Chinese Grand Prix Sprint.
Despite an ultimately disappointing Australian GP for Hadjar – retiring with a suspected power unit issue early on – there was a positive with his third-place qualifying time.
But in Shanghai, the same cannot be said, as the Frenchman scraped through to Q3, and wound up 10th, with teammate Max Verstappen eighth.
The Dutchman was honest in his summary of his car, admitting that it was losing huge amounts of time in the corners.
And Red Bull new boy Hadjar was perhaps even more blunt in his assessment of Red Bull’s deficit to the front runners.
Isack Hadjar blasts Red Bull pace in China
While happy with his own performance, Hadjar laid bare the scale of the team’s mountain to climb, highlighting multiple areas that the team is playing catch up over.
“I don’t know what happened yet and why we lost half a second, but happy with my lap,” he said to media, including Motorsport Week.
. “It was good but in the end, it doesn’t change. I don’t think that is going to change our weekend. So I’m just happy to be not too far from Max.
“We need a bit more of everything. More grip, more power, maybe. It was just very far off Mercedes, a lot more than we were last weekend.
“I was expecting the McLaren and the Ferrari to be ahead, but I didn’t expect the gap overall to increase.”
Red Bull’s dramatic pace drop off will have acted as a wake up call for Hadjar who worked tirelessly in 2025 to secure the second race seat alongside Verstappen.
To be two seconds adrift of Mercedes in Sprint Qualifying will please no one, yet alone Hadjar himself. A indictment of the gap to rivals, Hadjar had no choice but to publicly call out Red Bull for its failings. The team has one outspoken driver already, a second has the potential to cause many issues.
READ MORE: Max Verstappen delivers ‘disastrous’ F1 Chinese GP verdict for Red Bull
