As the new Red Bull Racing upper management remains unwilling to hire a priest to exorcise whatever has been haunting the team's second seat since Daniel Ricciardo departed in 2018 (not dead; simply living his best post-racing life, noticeably bearded and dirt-biking), reasonable roster decisions will have to suffice instead. On Tuesday, Red Bull officially announced that Isack Hadjar will replace Yuki Tsunoda at the factory team for 2026, and 18-year-old phenom Arvid Lindblad will fill Hadjar's spot at Red Bull's sister team, VCARB.
Bar an exorcist, Hadjar is the ideal choice for Red Bull, and most importantly, his promotion comes at the ideal time. Despite having the most brutal start to a rookie season possible—he crashed his car during the formation lap of a wet Australian Grand Prix—Hadjar recovered quickly in 2025 and was, for a stretch of the season, so impressive that the sword of mid-season promotion briefly hovered over him. However, with the Constructors' Championship well out of reach, Red Bull smartly opted not to promote Hadjar, giving him the opportunity to spend the last year of current aero regulations at the low-pressure environment of VCARB, with a much more manageable car.
There is always pressure intrinsic to being Max Verstappen's teammate, but the first year with new regulations is the most forgiving on a team's new driver, as previously demonstrated with George Russell's promotion to Mercedes. As he is not being hastily promoted in the middle of season, Hadjar will have a full year with the team, including crucial test drives, and he will not have to drive the notoriously difficult to handle RB21 car that his VCARB contemporaries in Tsunoda and Liam Lawson were strapped into.
Lindblad's promotion might be a bit more questionable, especially considering that his first season in Formula 2 has been middling. But, as was the case with Mercedes' own resident child Kimi Antonelli, experience and age play large roles in both F2 and early F1 performance. The only three drivers to win F2 in their first seasons were Charles Leclerc, George Russell, and Oscar Piastri—an impressive lineup of drivers who also all happened to be 20. There exists no precedent for a rookie teen winning F2. Everyone above Lindblad in the F2 standings is at least two years older than him.
Considering that the secondary option for Red Bull was demoting Tsunoda back down to VCARB, despite him no longer being a realistic option for the second Red Bull seat, promoting a potential future star makes much more sense than Tsunoda serving a Nyck de Vries–esque filler role. And unlike Antonelli, who was promoted directly to the main Mercedes team as an 18-year-old, Lindblad will have the cushion of at least one lower-pressure year at a mid-to-backfield team, the same luxury previously afforded to Verstappen, Leclerc, and Russell.
Meanwhile, Tsunoda will remain in the Red Bull ecosystem as a test and reserve driver, which is not an untidy ending for him. His underperformance in the second Red Bull seat in a notoriously difficult-to-drive car will sting, but his promotion to the factory team came as a total surprise in the first place; that he even had a chance is, depending on how you look at it, a blessing or curse. Meanwhile Liam Lawson, whose brief, disastrous promotion at the beginning of the season was most definitely a curse, will remain happily demoted to the sister team, which has been one of the best things to happen to his career. Which is about how the Red Bull second seat has gone up to now.
So everyone gets a relatively happy ending, which is an extremely odd sentence to write about Red Bull, whose roster decisions have, of late, rarely made anyone happy or, for that matter, made much sense at all. Of course, hope is one thing and success is another. We can only pray that Hadjar will not suffer the same miseries as Daniil Kvyat, Pierre Gasly, Alexander Albon, late-term Sergio Pérez, Liam Lawson, Yuki Tsunoda, and, spiritually, Daniel Ricciardo, the second time around. Personally, I would advise that Laurent Mekies keep Helmut Marko far, far away from the kids. And, if that doesn't work, perhaps Red Bull needs to seriously consider hiring an exorcist.
