As RaceFans reports, Isack Hadjar has made a striking claim ahead of this weekend's race in Austin, stating that his team mate Max Verstappen would have secured an even more dominant victory at the Singapore Grand Prix if he had been behind the wheel of a Ferrari.
Verstappen comes into the upcoming weekend having won the last two grands prix in a row, including a victory in Singapore where he beat Charles Leclerc by seven seconds. The pair had also battled closely in qualifying, with Verstappen edging Charles Leclerc to pole position by five hundredths of a second, while Lewis Hamilton—the quickest in Q1 and Q2—sat another seven hundredths of a second behind in the other Ferrari.
Despite these results, Hadjar remains convinced that his own machine is not the class of the field. “I don’t think we have the fastest car,” he said. While acknowledging that their package was dominant in Malaysia, he insisted that in Singapore, the Ferrari was actually the quickest machine on the track. In his view, Verstappen is simply extracting more performance from the car than Ferrari's drivers manage with theirs, leading him to state that Verstappen would have triumphed with a larger margin had he swapped into the rival Italian machinery.
That success has not translated smoothly across the garage for Hadjar himself. He was forced to start the Singapore race from the pit lane due to a penalty for replacing a failed power unit, ultimately fighting his way back to finish 10th. Describing the event as one of those weekends with a failure in every session, he is eager to move forward and put a frustrating period behind him in Texas.
Looking ahead to Austin, Hadjar expressed enthusiasm for the circuit and confidence in the team's recent performance level. Even so, the squad remains grounded, fully aware of rival upgrades and their own machine's known weaknesses as they continue working on fixes. For Hadjar, the primary goal in Texas is simple: to go out and secure a clean weekend after a turbulent run of races.
