Isack Hadjar didn’t smash his wrist against a punchbag in some dramatic training montage moment. He didn’t even feel anything at the time. He went to bed fine and woke up with a hairline fracture, which tells you everything about how cruelly random this sport’s misfortunes can be.
Hadjar has already been ruled out of the Dutch Grand Prix, with Liam Lawson parachuted into his Red Bull seat and Yuki Tsunoda making a surprise return at Racing Bulls. What’s new is the picture now forming of exactly how the injury happened and when Red Bull expect their man back in the cockpit.
A pain that arrived a day late
According to Craig Slater’s reporting on Sky Sports F1’s Dutch Grand Prix coverage, Hadjar’s injury wasn’t the result of some reckless one-off session. It came from the sort of routine gym work he does three times a week.
“Injury late last week was part of a routine training session, they think. He wasn’t doing anything different that he didn’t do three days a week in the gym. He does do some pad work, some boxing, hit some bags during his training, routinely, but did not hit a bag and feel pain. He became aware of the sensitivity the next morning and got it checked out by a doctor.” – Craig Slater
That detail matters. This wasn’t a driver overdoing it in a moment of summer-break bravado. It was ordinary training that happened to catch a bone at the wrong angle, with the pain only announcing itself the following morning. Slater added that a hand specialist was brought in alongside the team doctor before Red Bull made the call to stand him down as a precaution rather than risk making things worse.
Hairline crack, no rush back
Team boss Laurent Mekies has been careful not to sugarcoat or dramatise the situation, insisting there is no reason to gamble with a driver who has been quietly one of the form men of the 2026 season.
“We have no reason to take any risk with him. He has done a fantastic start of the season; he has been stronger and stronger every time he has been driving this car out of the garage, session after session, weekend after weekend. We take zero risk; we let him sort out the recovery this weekend, and hopefully we’ll have him very, very quickly back in the car.” – Laurent Mekies, to RacingNews365
Sky’s Slater reported that “with a fair wind” Hadjar should be fit to return for the Italian Grand Prix at Monza on 6 September, giving him a fortnight to let the hairline crack heal rather than aggravating it on Zandvoort’s notoriously bumpy surface. Given how physically punishing that track is, sitting this one out looks less like caution for caution’s sake and more like basic common sense.
The one word that said it all
Hadjar still made the trip to Zandvoort on Friday, arriving in the paddock with his hand tucked under his sleeve. When asked how the wrist actually felt, he didn’t offer some carefully rehearsed PR line. He gave one blunt word, said loudly enough to leave no doubt about his mood.
It is the kind of honest reaction that tells you more than any official statement ever could. This is a driver gutted to be missing a circuit where he took his maiden podium just twelve months ago, not some robotic professional reciting the “we’ll assess it race by race” script.
Zandvoort’s cruel irony
There’s a bitter symmetry here that Red Bull won’t want dwelling on too much. Hadjar’s only F1 podium to date came at this exact venue last year, finishing third behind Oscar Piastri and Max Verstappen for Racing Bulls, the result that first suggested he belonged in a top seat. Now he’s forced to watch from the sidelines at the same track, replaced by the very driver whose own Zandvoort story has been just as chaotic.
Lawson made his own shock F1 debut here in 2023 after Daniel Ricciardo, coincidentally, injured his own hand at this circuit. Lawson’s account of finding out about this latest recall was almost comically abrupt,
“I literally landed, I hadn’t even got off the plane. I had come from basically being on break and landed in the UK for what I thought was going to be obviously VCARB prep. Alan [Permane] called me and basically he told me what was going on. So then my week changed pretty quickly.” – Liam Lawson
What this means for the rest of the season
A hairline fracture sounds minor on paper, and Mekies is clearly keen for it to be treated that way in public. But Formula 1 cars generate brutal, repetitive loads through the wrists over a full race distance, and rushing a driver back too soon has ended careers, or at least seasons, before now. Red Bull’s caution here isn’t just PR spin, it’s the sensible move when your driver has genuinely been improving weekend on weekend, as has been evident across the team’s wider struggles this year.
Monza remains the target, not a guarantee. Two weeks is a tight window for a bone to heal properly, and anyone who has watched a driver grimace through gear changes on a supposedly recovered hand knows these things rarely follow the neat script teams would like. Hadjar will want to be back behind the wheel as soon as possible, if only to erase the memory of standing trackside at the one venue where he’s already proven he belongs on the podium.
The bigger picture
For now, Red Bull’s driver market chaos rolls on regardless. Max Verstappen has just signed a new long-term deal, while his teammate seat is being shuffled around like a game of musical chairs because of a bag of boxing pads. Formula 1 doesn’t do neat, tidy narratives. It does hairline fractures discovered the morning after, frantic phone calls at airports, and a young driver forced to swear loudly at his own wrist in a paddock he should have been racing in.
