Hadjar Keeps Azerbaijan GP Podium After Stewards' Investigation

Isack Hadjar can breathe out. The stewards have looked at his pre-race practice start breach in Baku, decided he was guilty of it, and then let him off with nothing more than a piece of paper. His third place at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix stands, Red Bull's double podium stays intact, and the whole affair turns out to be a lot of paperwork for very little consequence.

What Hadjar Actually Did Wrong

The investigation centred on the reconnaissance laps before the race, specifically on where drivers are allowed to carry out practice starts and how they are meant to rejoin the circuit afterwards. According to the stewards, Hadjar did not complete a practice start at all, and instructions required him to cross the white line separating pit exit from the track at the earliest opportunity to rejoin the normal racing line. Instead, he stayed on the pit-exit road and passed to the right of the cars ahead before rejoining, which the stewards ruled was a clear failure to follow the race director's instructions.

So the breach itself is not in dispute. The stewards found it, wrote it down and confirmed it happened. What saved Hadjar was the context around it.

Why He Got Away With It

The stewards accepted that Hadjar had to abandon his planned practice start, and concluded he was "distracted" when he failed to follow the correct procedure afterwards. That distraction was enough to tip the outcome in his favour.

"While the driver remains responsible for complying with the Race Director's instructions, the Stewards considered these circumstances sufficient to mitigate the penalty. Having also considered comparable previous incidents, the Stewards therefore determine that a Warning, rather than a Driving Reprimand, is appropriate." - FIA stewards

A warning rather than a reprimand, RacingNews365 reports. In the hierarchy of things the FIA can hand a driver, that is about as gentle as it gets. No points on the licence, no grid drop for Bahrain, nothing that touches the result in Baku. It is the regulatory equivalent of a stern look followed by a shrug.

A Podium Worth Protecting

Context matters here, because this was not just any weekend for Hadjar. He was making his return after missing the previous three grands prix with a wrist injury, and he marked it by qualifying as the leading Red Bull car before finishing third behind race-winner George Russell and team-mate Max Verstappen. It was, by any measure, one of the better comebacks of the season, and the stewards stripping it away over a procedural mix-up on the reconnaissance laps would have felt like a particularly cruel way to end it. He sat out the three races before Baku, and this result lifts him to eighth overall on 86 points, so this podium is not a nice-to-have. It is a meaningful chunk of a season that had otherwise gone quiet while he recovered.

The stewards treated the aborted practice start as a mitigating circumstance rather than a deliberate breach of instructions.

Not the Only Name on the List

Carlos Sainz was investigated for an almost identical offence at the same practice start location, though his weekend had already taken a harder hit earlier when he picked up a five-place grid penalty for failing to slow under yellow flags in qualifying. The practice start question was a shared problem, not something unique to Hadjar.

What This Says About the Stewards' Mood

Baku's stewards had a busy afternoon by any standard, working through a queue of incidents that included a time penalty for Franco Colapinto converted into a grid drop for the next race, and separate matters involving other drivers from the same weekend.

Red Bull will not be complaining. A double podium, with Verstappen closing in on Russell in the final laps before settling for second, is exactly the kind of afternoon the team needed after a season spent chasing Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren rather than beating them. Hadjar's third place holds, his warning goes in the file, and Baku becomes just another race weekend where the stewards had the final word and chose to use it kindly.