Isack Hadjar will join the Racing Bulls F1 team for 2025 after finishing second in F2 this year, the team announced today. Feeder Series explains the path that took Hadjar from being a little-known French F4 midfielder to the enfant chéri of the Red Bull Junior Team.

By Michael McClure, Calla Kra-Caskey, Martin Lloyd and Perceval Wolff-Taffus

Hadjar joins RB in F1 to fill the void left by Liam Lawson, who graduated from the Red Bull Racing–owned satellite team to the main team as the replacement for the embattled Sergio Pérez.

The reshuffling within the Red Bull stable, which had been rumoured for several months, puts Hadjar alongside Yuki Tsunoda in the RB fold. The Honda-backed 24-year-old enters his fifth season with the Faenza-based team and, in Hadjar, will have his fifth teammate at RB in as many years.

Hadjar has been the reserve driver for Red Bull Racing since September 2024. His signing to a race seat completes the grid for F1’s 76th season, which gets underway in three months’ time in Albert Park.

The 20-year-old graduates to F1 off the back of finishing second in the 2024 F2 season, 22.5 points behind eventual champion and fellow F1 graduate Gabriel Bortoleto. After a trying rookie season with Hitech GP in 2023, Hadjar switched to Campos Racing and became the team’s most successful driver in the second tier, finishing the season with four wins, four additional podiums and 192 points.

Despite leading the F2 standings for much of the summer, Hadjar was not initially expected to have a place on the grid. But re-shuffling within the Red Bull programme led the door to open in his favour after an autumn of protracted and widely publicised discussions with a number of drivers and an ensuing proxy war over the second seat at Red Bull Racing.

The saga began in June 2024, when Red Bull Racing announced that Pérez would continue with the team for two more seasons. The 34-year-old, who finished third in the 2022 drivers’ standings and second in 2023, stood on the podium in four of the first five F1 races of 2024 but had missed out in the three events preceding the extension announcement.

The contract extension, however, seemed to backfire as Pérez’s season spectacularly unravelled in the final 16 rounds. As teammate Max Verstappen took four wins, four further podiums and 268 points, Pérez never cracked the top five and came home with only 45 points more from that period. Red Bull slipped from a comfortable first to a distant third, 77 points behind McLaren, in the constructors’ standings even as Verstappen claimed his fourth drivers’ title in a row.

Pérez’s struggles ultimately pushed Red Bull to make a change for 2025. Onetime reserve driver Lawson, who was drafted in at RB to replace Daniel Ricciardo ahead of the United States Grand Prix, got the nod to replace him. Red Bull promoted Hadjar from within its own ranks to fill the void at RB, a direction that, Feeder Series understands, the team took last month after a wave of interest in Argentine Williams rookie Franco Colapinto earlier in the fall dissipated.

Hadjar is the first Red Bull junior to graduate directly from F2 to F1 since 2020 third-place finisher Tsunoda did so in 2021. The Frenchman’s ascension to F1 also makes him the fourth F2 driver from the 2024 grid to have earned an F1 berth for 2025. Previously, Haas confirmed Ollie Bearman on 4 July, Mercedes confirmed Andrea Kimi Antonelli on 31 August and Sauber confirmed Bortoleto on 6 November.

The respective promotions of Bortoleto and Hadjar mark the first time since 2018 that both the F2 champion and F2 runner-up have graduated to F1 the following year. Additionally, Hadjar’s promotion means the 2024 F2 season has the highest number of drivers directly promoted to F1 for the following year since 2009, when five drivers – Nico Hülkenberg, Vitaly Petrov, Lucas di Grassi, Kamui Kobayashi and Karun Chandhok – graduated to F1 in 2010.

Hadjar is set to become France’s 72nd F1 driver in history, joining a list that includes Alpine’s Pierre Gasly and Haas’ Esteban Ocon from among the current grid. He and Ocon also share the trait of having family heritage from Algeria, a nation yet to be formally represented in F1.

While the 20-year-old’s mother, Randa Hadjar, now guides his career as his manager, his father was the one who introduced him to racing. A research scientist with a doctorate degree in quantum physics, Yassine Hadjar also drove in amateur-level endurance racing and helped his son test a kart at the S-Kart circuit near Paris’s Porte de la Chapelle at the age of six.

The younger Hadjar moved on to competitive karting in France in the following years, notably finishing as runner-up of the French Cup in 2016 in the Cadet category behind friend and eventual teammate Hadrien David. With his father by his side as his mechanic throughout karting, Hadjar also competed internationally in 2017 and 2018 in junior karting.

He never achieved the headline results of his better-funded rivals in factory teams, but by the end of 2018 he felt had done enough to move into cars despite having forwent senior karting.

Hadjar got his start in cars in the 2018 Ginetta Junior Winter Championship with Elite Motorsport but failed to score a point. That, however, was scarcely a sign of what was to come for the Parisian, who moved into single-seater competition the following year in his homeland’s national F4 series. He had already won the Trophée Winfield in the winter of 2019, allowing him to receive financial support and coaching from the racing school for his French F4 debut.

Hadjar finished his maiden F4 season seventh overall with a victory at Spa and a podium at Lédenon, while he finished second in the three-member junior class behind Victor Bernier. At the start of the year, his smaller size limited his ability to push down fully on the pedals of his Mygale M14-F4.

After participating in two rounds in F4 UAE over the winter, Hadjar returned for another French F4 campaign in 2020. This time around he fared considerably better, albeit on a grid with only 14 cars as opposed to the previous year’s 19. He finished the pandemic-affected season with three wins and eight further podiums, ending up behind only Honda juniors Ayumu Iwasa and Ren Sato in the standings.

The two Japanese drivers who defeated Hadjar would enjoy stints of their own in the Red Bull Junior Team, but it was Hadjar whose stint at the Austrian marque bore the most fruit. While his tenure only officially began in 2022, his journey with Red Bull began with an overtake on the 2021 Spanish Grand Prix weekend in the second FRegional Europe race of the weekend.

Using all of the road and some of the grass on the start-finish straight in Barcelona, Hadjar nosed ahead of Gabriele Minì, his rival for the rookie title, for fourth place 12 minutes into the race, then sealed the pass by hanging on around the outside of Turn 2. This move impressed a spectating Pérez – whose place on the grid Hadjar now effectively fills – enough for the Mexican to tell Red Bull adviser Helmut Marko to follow him the next weekend at Monaco.

Earlier in the year, Hadjar had already impressed with five podiums from nine races in his F3 Asia debut for Evans GP, a new team making its own single-seater bow in the championship. But in Monaco, Hadjar hit a new level and broke through to score his first win in the category in race one, with pole position and the fastest lap to boot. He capped off the weekend with a second-place finish in race two behind R-ace GP teammate Zane Maloney.

Those performances thrilled Marko, who met with him in a Monégasque hotel for a swift round of negotiations. Hadjar knew for the rest of the FR Europe season that he would earn the energy drinks giant’s backing from 2022. Even as he hit a mid-season slump without an outright podium, he went out with a bang in the final round by taking second in the first race and a win in the second. He ended the year as FR Europe’s rookie champion.

For 2022, Hadjar stepped up to F3 with Hitech, which had a long-standing affiliation with the Red Bull Junior Team. In addition to post-season testing in 2021, he and the team warmed up over the winter in FR Asia, in which Hadjar took two victories and finished third overall. And from the first F3 race of the season, which Hadjar won after on-the-road winner Bearman earned a time penalty, he appeared a bona fide frontrunner, not just among the rookies.

Podiums in each of the first five rounds – including a dominant feature race win from pole in Austria – cemented his status as the series’ standout rookie early on, while a fourth-place finish in the Hungary sprint race even helped him to the championship lead entering the summer break.

Though he remained in the F3 title hunt until the final race, a torrid final three rounds, capped off by a crash in qualifying in Monza, ultimately spelled the end of Hadjar’s title hopes. He ended the year fourth in the points, 16 behind champion and countryman Victor Martins. But what arguably mattered more was the fact that he had seemingly become Red Bull’s favoured junior driver over the year, with Marko drawing comparisons between him and four-time F1 champion Alain Prost.

Already by the end of the summer break, Hadjar knew where he would be headed in 2023. His eventual F2 campaign with Hitech, however, proved disastrous. In what he admits was his worst season in cars in terms of results, Hadjar stood on the podium only twice – once as the winner of a shortened sprint race in Zandvoort that did not award points – and ended the year 14th in the standings.

That placement put him one point and two places behind Hitech teammate Jak Crawford and last among the six Red Bull juniors in F2 last year. Still, while Enzo Fittipaldi in seventh, Dennis Hauger in eighth, Zane Maloney in 10th and Crawford in 13th all lost Red Bull junior status at the end of the year, Hadjar remained in the programme for 2024 in a clear sign of Marko’s faith in him.

Hadjar made one additional appearance with Hitech in F3 machinery in the Macau Grand Prix, which he finished seventh as teammate Luke Browning won. But simmering discontent between team and driver contributed to Hadjar’s switch to Campos for 2024 as teammate to fellow Red Bull junior and fresh F3 graduate Pepe Martí.

Hadjar said he viewed the 2024 F2 season as his last chance to prove he was worthy of an F1 berth. In the end, he vindicated Marko’s decision to keep him by finishing the season as runner-up and taking a field-high four victories – all in feature races – at Albert Park, Imola, Silverstone and Spa.

Hadjar entered the final round of the championship just half a point behind Bortoleto, the closest margin in F2 history entering the final round, but lost the title by 22.5 points. In the final race – which he started third, one place behind Bortoleto – he stalled off the line and fell to the back of the field. That cost him any realistic chance at fighting for the title, and he came home 19th, one lap down on the field, as his rival finished second.

Other collisions, mechanical issues and instances of pure misfortune also hampered Hadjar’s charge. Engine-related issues forced him to retire from both races in Jeddah and hindered him in qualifying in Austria, while a brake failure in qualifying in Baku put him 20th on the grid for both races. He was also involved in three first-corner collisions, two with championship rival Bortoleto. Despite qualifying third for the feature race in Hungary, Hadjar had to start from pit lane after failing to make it out of pit lane before it closed. 

His season wasn’t all lows, though, and the highs swayed Red Bull. He finished in the top three in half of this year’s 14 qualifying sessions and took a pole position at Silverstone, while he also became Campos’ highest-placed driver in the history of F2 and predecessor series GP2 by finishing second. His results helped the team finish second in the teams’ championship, their best result since they won the title in 2008, and he is the Spanish team’s first second-tier graduate to earn a full-time F1 race seat the following year since Rio Haryanto, who raced for them in GP2 in 2015.

While the Australian Grand Prix on 16 March will mark Hadjar’s F1 race debut, he already has experience behind the wheel of F1 machinery on race weekends. He took part in free practice one in the 2023 Mexico City Grand Prix for AlphaTauri, the former identity of RB, before getting a chance with Red Bull Racing in the season finale in Abu Dhabi.

He then drove for the main Red Bull team in FP1 sessions at both Silverstone and Yas Marina this year and added an appearance in F1’s post-season young driver test at the Emirati venue last week to his résumé.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency