Call it a disaster if you want, but Isack Hadjar still planted his Red Bull third on the grid for Sunday's race at COTA, as Crash.net reports. The Milton Keynes-based outfit arrived at the United States Grand Prix riding high after Max Verstappen's victories in Malaysia and Singapore alongside a 2-3 finish in Azerbaijan. That fierce pace clearly carried over to Texas, with Verstappen securing second in qualifying and Hadjar slotting in directly behind him.
Yet, the French driver has endured a massively frustrating time on track, plagued constantly by track limits violations that completely undermined his preparations heading into qualifying. Describing the event bluntly, he admitted it has been a disaster of a weekend because his lap times kept getting deleted over and over. During the morning session, he could not even complete a single flying lap on the soft tyres.
Despite those setbacks, he knew there was potential locked inside the machine since he felt comfortable during the first halves of his runs, even if he could never finish them cleanly. The team dug deep on the set-up, cycling through endless changes that ultimately paid off when the car finally came alive during qualifying, bringing a deeply satisfying turnaround.
Still, a sense of frustration lingered over his final execution in Q3. While acknowledging that track conditions worsened for everyone on the very last lap, he felt particularly gutted about his first attempt, losing significant time due to a massive tailwind and believing a better result was genuinely on the table.
Reflecting on the team's strategy to run used tyres in Q2 before switching back to fresh rubber for Q3, Hadjar does not believe the tyre management heavily penalized his performance. Noting that COTA is a circuit where used rubber holds up relatively well, he acknowledged that while rolling out an endless sequence of fresh sets might have helped slightly, there was not a massive difference in the end.
