Baku is the earliest Hadjar can return, and a simulator run will decide it
Laurent Mekies names Azerbaijan as the target, but simulator results will make the final call on whether Hadjar reclaims his seat.
Isack Hadjar sat out a third consecutive race weekend in Madrid, and Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies has now named the Azerbaijan Grand Prix as the earliest realistic date for his return. The condition attached to it has not moved since Zandvoort.
Hadjar fractured his wrist punching a heavy bag during training in the closing days of the summer break. It has cost him Zandvoort, Monza and now the Madring, with Liam Lawson alongside Max Verstappen for all three and Yuki Tsunoda covering at Racing Bulls.
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Mekies set one condition and nothing else
There was no ambiguity in what Mekies said about leaving Hadjar out in Madrid.
He added that Red Bull had always intended to prioritise Hadjar coming back at full fitness, and that there was no point throwing him into a circuit like the Madring while he was not feeling good, because doing so risked delaying the recovery itself.
That is a team taking the long view on a driver it has already committed to, and it is consistent with what it said at Monza, covered in our earlier report on the stand-in arrangement.
The simulator at Milton Keynes decides it
The gap between Madrid and Baku is longer than the gap between Monza and Madrid, and Red Bull intends to use it. Mekies pointed to more time before Azerbaijan and to putting Hadjar on the simulator as the way of finding out where he actually is.
That matters more than it might sound for a wrist injury. Braking loads and high-speed direction changes go through the wrists more than anywhere else in a Formula 1 car, and a simulator run at Milton Keynes reproduces enough of that to tell Red Bull whether the joint holds up over a race distance rather than over one lap.
Baku opens a triple-header
Azerbaijan is not a standalone weekend. It starts three races on three consecutive weekends, with Malaysia and then Singapore following it, and that changes the shape of the decision.
Clear Hadjar for Baku and he is committed to the whole run. A wrist that comes through Friday in Baku and then fails in the Singapore heat leaves Red Bull worse off than it is now, because the replacement would then be scrambling mid-sequence. The Baku City Circuit is also among the least forgiving places on the calendar to find out, with long full-throttle sections and walls that leave no margin.
Lawson has made the decision harder, not easier
Lawson qualified eighth and finished seventh on his first weekend back in the senior car at Zandvoort, which is a solid return for a driver dropped from that seat in 2025. Monza went the other way through no great fault of his own: he broke his front wing on Nico Hulkenberg’s rear wheel at the Turn 1 restart and lost around 30 seconds replacing it.
In Madrid he was seventh in final practice, 1.105 seconds off the fastest time and comfortably inside the top ten on a circuit nobody had driven before. None of that makes Red Bull reconsider Hadjar, who is the contracted driver. It does mean the team is not under pressure to hurry, and that is a luxury it would not have with a weaker stand-in.
Our position: there is no case for rushing this
Red Bull is handling this the right way, and it is worth saying so, because the alternative version of this story is familiar and usually ends badly. A driver declares himself fit because he is frightened of what a substitute might do to his seat, and the injury comes back worse.
Mekies has removed that pressure by making the criterion the driver’s own judgement of his fitness rather than the team’s assessment of the calendar. Hadjar does not have to prove anything by turning up at Baku.
The one thing worth watching is that three weeks out of the car is real. It is not just the wrist. Nobody arrives at a street circuit after a month away and is immediately where they were, and Baku punishes rustiness harder than most.
What happens next
The simulator run in the coming days is the checkpoint. If it goes well, expect Red Bull to confirm Hadjar for Azerbaijan on the Thursday of the weekend rather than earlier.
If it does not, Lawson gets a fourth weekend and Tsunoda a fourth at Racing Bulls, and the conversation moves to Malaysia.
We are covering the Spanish Grand Prix weekend as it happens on the RNT-Motorsports live blog.
