Isack Hadjar will not race at Monza this weekend. The wrist he injured over the summer break still hurts too much to trust in a car doing well over 300 km/h down the Monza straights, and Red Bull are once again reaching into their remarkably deep bench rather than push a 21-year-old back before he is ready.
RacingNews365 has learned that Hadjar’s setback, first picked up during the summer, has not cleared up in time for the Pirelli Gran Premio d’Italia. It is the second race weekend in a row he has had to sit out, and it raises an obvious question: how much longer can Red Bull afford to wait before this becomes a genuine dent in his campaign rather than a footnote?
A Second Missed Weekend
Hadjar skipped the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort after hurting his wrist in a training incident, and turned up in the paddock that weekend with his forearm strapped into a protective sleeve, watching from the sidelines as Liam Lawson filled in alongside Max Verstappen. That image alone told you the injury was more than a minor knock. Now Monza has arrived too soon as well, and Hadjar will again be watching rather than driving.
Team principal Laurent Mekies has been consistent on this from the start: there is no reason to gamble with a driver’s long-term health when the team has options sitting right behind him. It is an easy stance to take when your reserve talent is this strong, and it is one that looks sensible rather than soft given how comfortably Red Bull’s stand-ins have coped so far.
Lawson Delivers, Tsunoda Returns
Lawson did more than simply fill a seat at Zandvoort. He brought the RB22 home in seventh, picking up six points in what was, realistically, close to the ceiling for that car on the day. It was a tidy reminder that Red Bull’s driver pool runs deeper than most grids’ entire roster, and it makes the decision to keep Hadjar out again considerably easier to stomach from a results perspective.
Lawson’s temporary promotion, in turn, opened a seat at Racing Bulls for Yuki Tsunoda, who marked his return to a race weekend by out-qualifying and out-racing Arvid Lindblad to finish eleventh, agonisingly close to the points. Given Tsunoda sits on zero points for the season so far, that near-miss will have stung, but it was hardly an embarrassing showing for a driver parachuted back into a car cold.
Why Red Bull Aren’t Panicking
This is the part that makes Hadjar’s absence easier to swallow for Red Bull than it would be for almost anyone else on the grid. Six-time constructors’ champions do not build that record by accident, and a large part of the current operation’s strength is the sheer number of capable bodies it can throw into a cockpit without the car falling off a cliff.
That depth is precisely why Mekies can afford to be patient with Hadjar rather than rush him back into a Formula 1 car with a wrist that still isn’t right. There is no title fight for Red Bull to worry about protecting; sitting sixth in the standings on 112 points, some way adrift of the frontrunners, the team has more to lose from a rushed comeback wrecking his season than it has to gain from squeezing one more points finish out of him this weekend.
Same Pairings, Same Plan
With both stand-ins having done their jobs competently, Red Bull will run the identical arrangement for the Italian Grand Prix: Lawson alongside Verstappen at Red Bull, Tsunoda covering for Lawson at Racing Bulls. It is the sensible, low-drama call, and given how the substitutions have gone so far, nobody inside the team has much reason to think twice about it.
Hadjar’s season, which had shown genuine promise before the injury interrupted it, is now on pause for a second consecutive weekend. Monza’s long straights and hard braking zones were never going to be a gentle re-introduction for a wrist that still isn’t right, and Red Bull deserve some credit for resisting the temptation to find out the hard way. Whether that patience holds if the injury drags into further rounds is a different question, and one Red Bull will not want to keep answering.
