Isack Hadjar disappointed with his qualifying performance in Miami: "I felt very good in Q2, then in Q3..."

For Isack Hadjar, the weekend in Miami wasn't easy. For the first time this season, the Frenchman was noticeably out of contention against... Max Verstappen and concedes a gap that he himself struggles to understand and explain. However, all is not catastrophic for the Frenchman, far from it: in sprint qualifying and during the Sprint, he did not leave the top 10, finishing both sessions in 9th position.

This gave him hope of another appearance in Q3, having reached the final stages of qualifying every season: he achieved this with another 9th place, but just over eight-tenths of a second behind his teammate Max Verstappen, who started second on the grid. Despite this gap, Isack Hadjar found a bit more confidence in his car, but failed to put everything together in Q3 to achieve the lap that would have allowed him, at the very least, to take 8th place from Franco Colapinto, who beat him by less than two hundredths.

“Today (Saturday) was much better. Honestly, throughout the session it was fine, except in Q3. I felt very good in Q2, but in Q3… I had problems with downshifting, I lost a lot of time in the first sector.” Le Parisien told Canal+ after the session. “On the straights, we’re way behind the other car (Max Verstappen’s, editor’s note). I control what I can control: in the corners, I’m there; after that, the rest… there’s nothing. It was okay this morning, but it wasn’t quite there yet on a flying lap, we’re still lacking performance. [Our engineers] haven’t been able to find it. It’s true that there isn’t a nine-tenths difference, but there’s definitely time lost.”

Despite this mixed result, the driver Red Bull can aim for good points during the Grand Prix, with a car that has shown itself to be relatively comfortable in Sprint, completing the 19 laps in 5th place in the hands of Max Verstappen.

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