The mystery behind Isack Hadjar’s confusing radio message at the US GP is finally cleared up after a Red Bull problem.
Here’s what really happened with Isack Hadjar’s radio messages during the United States Grand Prix with Red Bull race engineer Richard Wood.
After his first pit stop, Hadjar got a bit frustrated and sent a few messages asking why he was put on hard tyres for his final stint. The communication problems he had were partly because of radio trouble that also affected his teammate Max Verstappen. But on top of that, there was another issue with Hadjar’s car that cost him precious time at the Circuit of the Americas.
According to Motorsport.com, Hadjar was talking to his engineer about the hard tyre choice as he left the pit lane, but he forgot to change the throttle map setting on his steering wheel, which was still set from before his pit stop. Because of this, he had to press the throttle pedal about 40% harder than normal to get it to respond properly.
This made his second stint tougher because managing throttle is key to protecting tyres and avoiding “slip” while taking corners. Even so, Hadjar finished in sixth place, 34 seconds behind winner Kimi Antonelli. He couldn’t hold off Lewis Hamilton, who passed him soon after Hadjar’s second pit stop on lap 38. Hamilton might have caught up to Verstappen for third place on fresher tyres, but a virtual safety car after Valtteri Bottas’ engine failure on lap 52 ended those hopes.
After the race, Hadjar explained that he couldn’t hear his engineer’s messages in the pit lane, which led to the throttle map mistake. “I have poor radio coverage,” he said. “I can’t hear what’s happening in the pits. Then I leave the pits with the wrong map, and I’m losing about a second every lap on that hard tyre.”
He also talked about Red Bull’s clutch problems at the start of races, which are affecting both him and Verstappen. “Right now, it’s the small things we can’t get right. My radio is bad, I dropped the clutch. It’s turning into a nightmare. If we fix these two things, we might be on the podium. The hardest stuff seems doable, but the little silly things are holding us back.”
Team boss Laurent Mekies said, “If we understood the radio problem fully, we would have fixed it by now. We can hear everyone’s radio, but we’re struggling more than we expected.”