Max Verstappen won’t even get to drive his own car on Friday. Red Bull has confirmed a reshuffled lineup for opening practice at Monza, and it’s the kind of announcement that tells you far more about the state of the team than any press release ever will.
Verstappen will sit out FP1 at the Italian Grand Prix, handing the RB22 to Ayumu Iwasa as part of Red Bull’s rookie driver obligations. Meanwhile, Isack Hadjar remains out of action entirely, still recovering from the wrist fracture he picked up over the summer break, with Liam Lawson stepping in for a second successive weekend.
Verstappen’s Turn to Sit One Out
Every team is required to run young drivers across a set number of FP1 sessions each season, and Red Bull has been dragging its feet on the obligation all year. Verstappen’s session at Monza is only the first of his two mandatory outings, which means somewhere down the line he’ll be parked for another one before the season ends. Hadjar, for his part, already gave up a session earlier in the year when Iwasa took his car at the Barcelona Grand Prix, so he too still owes the sport one more Friday afternoon on the sofa.
In a social media post, Red Bull framed it plainly: “Ready for Monza. Ayumu will drive Max’s car during FP1, as part of the rookie driver programme.” Verstappen returns for FP2, so this isn’t some grand sacrifice, just box-ticking at a venue where every lap matters given Monza’s low-downforce demands and the eye-watering top speeds through the Parabolica.
Hadjar Still Sidelined, Lawson Gets Another Go
The bigger story, buried underneath the rookie reshuffle, is that Hadjar still isn’t fit to race. He’s missing his second grand prix in succession after fracturing his wrist during the summer break, and Red Bull’s language around his recovery remains carefully vague. “Liam will drive alongside Max at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza, while Isack continues to make encouraging progress following the wrist injury sustained during the summer break,” the team said in a statement. “The team is closely monitoring his rehabilitation and will take no unnecessary risks with his return to competition and wishes him a speedy recovery.”
Encouraging progress is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Nobody at Red Bull is putting a date on Hadjar’s return, and the longer that silence continues, the harder it gets to take “encouraging” at face value. This is now Lawson’s second consecutive weekend deputising, after he banked points for the team in P7 at Zandvoort, as reported by Formula1.com. Lawson himself admitted the switch hasn’t been straightforward, calling it “challenging” to adapt to the RB22 on short notice, though he added: “It’s been a good weekend. It was good to extract everything out of Quali. It’s been tough to try and get my head around this car in a short space of time, but I’ve enjoyed it.”
Tsunoda Fills the Gap at Racing Bulls
With Lawson borrowed for Red Bull duty, Racing Bulls has again turned to reserve driver Yuki Tsunoda, who gets a second consecutive weekend in the car following his return at the Dutch Grand Prix. Tsunoda narrowly missed out on points there, finishing P11, and sounded satisfied with the effort afterwards. “I definitely enjoyed it overall, and yeah, I think I gave it 100%, as much as I can,” he said. “I think I did pretty okay.” It’s a modest return for a driver who lost his grid seat at the end of last season, but it keeps him visible, and visible is currently more than Hadjar can manage.
A Team Treading Water
Strip away the driver-swap headlines and what’s left is a Red Bull team that remains winless in 2026, sitting fourth in the constructors’ standings on 186 points, some 77 behind third-placed McLaren and a chastening 239 adrift of championship leaders Mercedes. That gap isn’t closing anytime soon with 11 races still to run, and shuffling reserve drivers in and out of one seat while the other struggles for reliability isn’t exactly a sign of a team building momentum.
Verstappen’s own season tells the same story from a different angle. He sits sixth in the drivers’ championship on 112 points, some 130 behind runaway leader Kimi Antonelli, and his best result all year remains a pair of second places in Austria and Hungary. His retirement from his home race at Zandvoort didn’t help matters either. At this rate, Verstappen is staring down a first winless season since his debut campaign back in 2015, and no amount of FP1 rookie rotation is going to fix that. Missing a single practice session is the least of Red Bull’s problems this weekend, it’s the 12 races of the season already gone without a win that should really be keeping people at Milton Keynes up at night.
None of this changes the immediate task at Monza: Lawson needs to keep delivering points while Hadjar’s wrist heals on its own schedule, and Verstappen needs to stop tinkering with symbolism and start finding pace. Practice for the Italian Grand Prix gets underway on Friday at 10:30 UTC, with qualifying following on Saturday at 14:00 UTC and the race on Sunday at 13:00 UTC. Check the calendar for your local time and see whether Red Bull’s patchwork lineup can produce anything more than a footnote.
