What the F1 Singapore GP meant for Red Bull’s 2026 driver decision

After facing a well-publicised sputtering in its pipeline of young talent, such that it hired the experienced Sergio Perez to partner Max Verstappen for four seasons, Red Bull now has more Formula 1 prospects coming through its system.

That, as ever, means peril for all the grand prix drivers on its books apart from Verstappen, since Dr Helmut Marko has always run the Junior Team on an up-or-out basis. Indeed, perhaps now more than ever, now Christian Horner is no longer part of the picture, for the two often had marked differences of opinion on policy decisions.

Marko, for instance, wanted to axe Perez earlier last season but Horner stayed the executioner’s hand, as he had with Daniel Ricciardo at Racing Bulls. Not that it would have made much difference to how the season would have panned out anyway, but such is the rich perspective afforded by hindsight.

The treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen philosophy extends to contract renewal: the futures of Yuki Tsunoda, Isack Hadjar and Liam Lawson are all uncertain until at least the end of October. Marko has said Hadjar is under contract for 2026, but not which team he will be placed in – and Hadjar himself has pushed back at rumours of an imminent switch to Red Bull, which gathered momentum after his outstanding race at Zandvoort.

Meanwhile Alex Dunne has entered the chat alongside Arvid Lindblad in terms of making the jump from F2 to F1. Dunne and McLaren severed their relationship ahead of the Singapore weekend, and it’s understood a key reason for this was McLaren’s inability to furnish him with a next career step within the time frame he desires.

In other seasons, the easy call would be to drop the least performant of the current F1 drivers, but the imminent change in the technical regulations is a complicating factor. Given the uncertainty surrounding the pecking order between the teams, there is an argument that this isn’t the right moment to change the driver mix.

Hadjar’s next move

Isack Hadjar’s stock is high at the moment, and with good reason. Engine issues in recent races have blunted the upward trend line slightly, but he has built well from a disappointing maiden F2 season in 2023 to being the runner-up last year.

Shunting on the formation lap in Melbourne has been his only major blunder of the year and he scored his podium at Zandvoort on merit. Last weekend’s performance is typical of Hadjar’s here and now.

He had never driven in Singapore and yet looked fast and assured for most of the weekend, his only real demerits being the lock-up at Turn 8 which scuppered his final Q3 lap, and his intemperate response to being informed of the onset of a power-unit issue mid-race.

In the first instance he berated himself because he felt that he could have qualified fifth if he had kept the lap clean. Fair enough, but he needs to channel his anger better – shouting at a problem won’t cure it. Ranting at the team about the power unit was a waste of energy and doesn’t fit the top-level sporting mantra of controlling the controllables.

Fernando Alonso overtook in both stints but Hadjar’s robust yet precise defence around Marina Bay, while carrying the power-unit problem (which Racing Bulls estimated cost him half a second a lap), impressed everyone except Alonso. And, given that Fernando has on many occasions meted out similar treatment to those trying to pass him, harrumphing “we lost five seconds with the hero of the day, congrats” was both churlish and a little patronising.

Underrated by many in the Red Bull set-up ahead of this season, Hadjar has surprised his doubters and is clearly deserving of a place in F1. The question for Red Bull is what to do with him now, given the potential perils involved in moving to the senior team.

If Hadjar were to move to Red Bull and the team begins next season behind where it wants to be, resources will naturally coalesce around Verstappen – even more so than now – lest he decide to trigger his exit clause. That will make the second seat an even more uncomfortable place to be.

Still, it’s understood Hadjar is likely to move and the decision will be taken after the Mexican GP.

The Lawson conundrum

Liam Lawson is sailing dangerously close to territory which has claimed other Red Bull juniors over the past two decades: an obviously talented driver entering a downward spiral of confidence. He races assertively, has shown the right turn of speed, but has become the sort of driver to which things happen – rather than one who is clearly in control of their own destiny.

Singapore was one of those weekends. Lawson crashed out of FP2 and FP3; to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, shunting twice looks like carelessness, though Lawson himself was more prosaic, saying it was “not good enough from me”.

Losing track time compounds the difficulty of preparing for the rest of the weekend and makes for poor comparisons with your team-mate if they’re building well. To his great credit, he got as far as Q2 despite the loss of all this track time – but qualifying outside the top 10 on a track like Singapore dictated Lawson had a very different Sunday to Hadjar.

Ultimately his race went south when the strategy of running a long first stint put him back out on track behind a train of cars including Alex Albon, who was instructed to slow Lawson down to benefit Carlos Sainz, who was running behind Lawson on a similar strategy but stopped two laps later. Lawson part-authored his own misfortune here by having a slow in-lap.

That’s been his season in a nutshell: Lawson is quick and races well for the most part, then lets himself down through small but costly details of execution. So the question facing Dr Marko now is whether a replacement – Lindblad being the most immediate – would be as fast, if not faster, and make fewer errors.

Why, why, why Tsunoda?

For many reasons, Yuki Tsunoda has made very heavy weather of this season – although, at the risk of stretching the metaphor, he has faced headwinds in the form of unequal equipment and a team very much oriented around servicing the requirements of the driver in the garage next door.

Tsunoda’s struggles have at least had one positive outcome, in that Red Bull now fundamentally accepts its car has been the problem rather than the number-two driver.

After brighter performances in recent races, in Singapore Yuki was rather less impressive. “He was at the right level on Friday,” said team boss Laurent Mekies. “Saturday was poor.” Disturbingly, neither he nor the team could account for the lack of grip he complained about – and not having the latest-spec front wing was in no way a plausible explanation for this, or for being eight tenths off Verstappen in Q2, where Tsunoda was eliminated.

That was always going to consign him to a race dictated by traffic, and Tsunoda lost four places on the opening lap by choosing the “middle lane” into Turn 1 and having to back off to avoid the inevitable squeeze. All in all it was an anonymous and undistinguished outing.

Typically the benchmark Marko sets for Verstappen’s team-mates is to be within three tenths of the Dutchman in qualifying. Until Red Bull has a second driver who can run at the front in relatively close proximity to the lead car, it doesn’t have a hope of winning the constructors’ championship again.

But that competition is over for this year, so throwing Tsunoda out now would make little sense, especially since Red Bull is only just reaching a turning point with its car. If the RB21 wasn’t so bad after all, but just required a different set-up direction and some sympathetic development, it might actually be useful to see if Tsunoda can make the leap.

His future now depends on whether Red Bull’s leaders think Hadjar should move to the senior team in 2026 or be left to mature for another season.

The shock of the new

F1’s forthcoming ruleset is going to change the envelope of car performance so drastically that drivers are going to have to go through a huge adjustment process. Some, notably Oliver Bearman, have pointed out that this could play to the advantage of rookies since they have fewer ingrained habits which need to be changed.

But while this is an argument in favour of Red Bull shuffling its drivers to accommodate a new one at Racing Bulls, perhaps a more compelling one is to say that with so much change on the horizon, adding more disruption into the mix would be counter-productive.

There are practical obstacles too. Alex Dunne has yet to secure a superlicence, which militates against him making the jump for 2026. Arvid Lindblad does have one, but his F2 season doesn’t make a compelling case for immediate promotion; despite winning two races, he currently lies seventh.

But never underestimate Dr Marko’s predisposition for wielding the axe.

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– The Autosport.com Team