Isack Hadjar crossed the line in seventh place during qualifying for the 2025 Canadian Grand Prix, separated from his Red Bull team-mate Max Verstappen by just 0.028 seconds. By any objective measure, it was the closest the French rookie had come to the four-time world champion in months. Yet Hadjar walked away from Montreal’s Circuit Gilles Villeneuve furious, convinced he had left a significant chunk of time scattered across the lap.
A Near-Miss That Felt Like a Miss
Qualifying seventh at a circuit as demanding and street-like as Montreal is no small achievement, particularly for a driver still finding his feet in Formula 1. For Hadjar, however, the margin to Verstappen told only part of the story. The 20-year-old was blunt in his self-assessment after the session, describing his lap in terms that left little room for ambiguity, calling it shitty despite the fact that he had nearly split the field ahead of his more experienced team-mate.
What makes the frustration credible rather than simply dramatic is the context behind it. Hadjar genuinely believes the car had more to give, and that a cleaner, more composed lap could have placed him even higher on the grid. That kind of critical self-awareness is often the mark of a driver who understands pace at a deep level, even if the raw results do not yet consistently reflect it.
Progress Against a Relentless Benchmark
Matching Max Verstappen in qualifying is one of the most difficult tasks in modern Formula 1. The Dutchman has redefined what is possible on a single flying lap, and his team-mates across recent seasons have routinely found themselves half a second or more adrift. Against that backdrop, 0.028 seconds is a meaningful data point, and it represents Hadjar’s best qualifying performance since the season opener in Melbourne.
The last time Hadjar came close to Verstappen in a qualifying head-to-head was the Japanese Grand Prix earlier in the 2025 season. Since then, the gap had grown at several rounds, with Hadjar struggling to extract the maximum from the RB21 over a single lap. Montreal appears to have offered a reset of sorts, with the circuit’s low-speed corners and stop-start rhythm suiting a driving style that Hadjar is still refining.
The result is his best qualifying outcome in several rounds and signals that the form which made him so highly rated through the junior categories has not disappeared. It has simply been buried under the steep learning curve every rookie faces when stepping into a front-running car against the sport’s best.
The Bigger Picture for a Rookie Under Pressure
Hadjar arrived in Formula 1 with enormous expectations. A Formula 2 champion and a product of the Red Bull junior programme, he was always going to be measured against the highest possible standard from day one. Being placed alongside Verstappen, rather than eased in beside a mid-table team-mate, accelerates that evaluation process in ways that are both brutal and clarifying.
The 2025 season has not been without difficulty for Hadjar. Qualifying has been the area where the gap to Verstappen has felt most pronounced, and several rounds saw him struggle to translate strong long-run pace into competitive single-lap performance. The technical demands of extracting a Red Bull over one lap on fresh rubber require a precision that comes with time and repetition, and Hadjar is still accumulating both.
What Saturday in Montreal demonstrated is that the gap is not structural. It is not a question of fundamental speed or talent ceiling. It is a question of refinement, and 0.028 seconds suggests that refinement is happening in real time. A driver who loses nearly three tenths to his team-mate in qualifying week after week does not suddenly close to within a blink of an eye without genuine underlying improvement.
What the Race Could Reveal
Starting seventh on the grid at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve gives Hadjar a realistic opportunity to score strong points in the race. Montreal is a circuit where strategy and overtaking opportunities can shift positions dramatically, particularly around the hairpin and the final chicane. A clean start and smart tyre management could see him move forward through the field.
More importantly for Hadjar’s season trajectory, carrying the momentum of a competitive qualifying performance into race day could help him build on what has been a frustrating but instructive first half of the campaign. The goal is not just results in isolation but the kind of consistent, progressive improvement that tells the Red Bull hierarchy they made the right call in placing him at the senior team.
Isack Hadjar called his Montreal qualifying lap shitty. The stopwatch said it was 0.028 seconds behind the fastest qualifier in the world. Both things can be true at the same time, and that tension is precisely what makes Hadjar’s situation compelling. He is a driver with the sensitivity to know when he has underperformed even when the result looks respectable from the outside, and that awareness will serve him well as the 2025 season develops. If he can begin converting competitive qualifying laps into the clean, complete efforts he knows he is capable of, the gap to Verstappen will continue to shrink. Sunday’s race at Montreal will be the first chance to build on that promise.