Hadjar stranded on back row after power unit fire and broken gear ruin Singapore Saturday

Isack Hadjar will line up at the rear of the grid for Sunday’s Singapore Grand Prix after a wretched Saturday at Marina Bay left the Red Bull rookie without a sprint finish or a qualifying lap to his name.

A track limits violation had already dropped Hadjar to ninth on the sprint grid, but he made it only two laps before a power unit failure forced him into the Turn 5 escape road — his car catching fire as he searched for a safe place to stop. Red Bull provisionally repaired the RB22 in time for grand prix qualifying, only for a broken fourth gear to prevent him from completing a timed lap, leaving him eliminated in Q1 without a time.

“It’s pissing me off because I just want to drive,” Hadjar said. “I just want to get to it and go new tyre after new tyre, and now I don’t get to do that. I’m stuck in… yeah, I’m just really, really pissed off.”

The 22-year-old Frenchman was candid about the chaos of his sprint retirement. “My car got caught on fire and stuff. It was just a disaster. Today, I don’t even know. I could have stayed back in Paris. It would have been the same.”

The setback extends a run of mechanical misfortune for Hadjar. At last weekend’s Malaysian Grand Prix he was running strongly before a battery failure dropped him to fifth late in the race.

The contrast with team-mate Max Verstappen could hardly be sharper. The four-time world champion won both the Sepang grand prix and the Singapore sprint from pole position and will start Sunday’s race from the front row again — underlining the pace available in the RB22 that Hadjar has so far been unable to access.

Hadjar also pointed to the structural constraints of sprint weekends as a compounding factor, arguing that the single practice session and strict parc ferme regulations leave little room to fix handling problems between sessions.

“You don’t get to work on the car. Like, it’s just impossible. You just kind of need to get lucky,” he said. “I was excited for today to see what the change brought. I was excited to see what I could do with the engine that was working fine and I don’t get to do it, so it’s hard to learn anything on weekends like that.”