How quickly Monaco can bite – and especially for a rookie – that had to experience Isack Hadjar painfully on Friday. The racing bull pilot made two strikes in the guardrails in the second free training session and prepared a lot of work to its mechanics.
After seven minutes, the session had to be interrupted for the first time because Hadjar had reached the guardrail in the harbor chicane with his left rear wheel. On the way towards Tabac curve, the Frenchman parked his Vcarb 02 before making it back into the garage.
After a repair break, the Racing Bulls Hadjar were able to send him back on the track, but a second misfortune passed around eleven minutes before the end of the session. In curve 1, the rookie touched the guardrail again with the rear wheel and damaged its suspension.
With a crooked car and with an advertising foil on his left front wheel, he dragged himself around the course and then finally put the racing off in the garage – not without distributing some of the plastic on the track beforehand.
“That went on my cap,” he quarrels, apologizing to his mechanics. “I am a bit sorry that they had more work, but they are really extremely fast. They were incredible today.”
He speaks of a “difficult day” in which he often played with the limits. “In the 2nd training I was pretty scared because I thought it was briefly. But I still brought the car back – it didn’t really want it anymore, but I forced it – and we were able to drive a few laps on the softs.”
In the meantime, Hadjar had excited himself about himself on the radio. “Man, I’m so stupid,” he sparked, adding a little later: “I’ve never been so stupid, so stupid! Sorry, boys.”
The statements were not well received by Red Bull Motor Sports Consulent Helmut Marko after he had already described his tears as “a bit embarrassing” after the end of the end of the warm-up round in Australia. “He should concentrate and not do intelligence statements,” says the Austrian at Sky, but at least praises his speed again.
“He is on the wall twice, but he was quick,” he notes. Hadjar had finished sixth (+0,487 seconds) on Friday, two hundredths of a second behind teammate Liam Lawson.