Hadjar's Austin practice unravels as front tyres die in sector one of FP2

Isack Hadjar endured a damaging second practice session at the Circuit of the Americas on Friday, calling his Red Bull RB22 “just undriveable” after a set-up change between sessions caused severe front-tyre overheating and left him 0.9 seconds adrift of team-mate Max Verstappen.

Hadjar had been cautiously optimistic after FP1, finishing 14th but feeling the car was heading in a workable direction. He opted to explore a different set-up for FP2 — a decision that quickly unravelled. By the time he attempted his qualifying simulation on the soft compound, the front tyres were already spent after the first sector.

“I was happy-ish with how it went this morning,” Hadjar said. “Afterwards, I thought I was heading in the right direction, but it only brought a lot more problems. On the soft, the car was completely gone for me. It was very difficult to drive.”

The damage was concentrated in the high-speed Esses that define the opening sector of the COTA layout. Once the fronts overheated through those corners, Hadjar was powerless to recover pace for the rest of the lap — slower, he noted, than he had been on the harder medium compound.

“It was just a disaster. I made most of my lap time in sector 1, but from sector 1 until the end of the lap I was slower than on the medium. I was losing the front end massively. The fronts were completely killed in the high-speed corners.”

Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache confirmed the diagnosis. “With this type of layout, you have the full high-speed corners in sector 1, after Turn 1. And I think if you overcook the tyres there, it’s more or less finished for the lap,” he said.

The contrast with Verstappen’s day was stark. The four-time champion described his own running as largely positive, though he acknowledged the RB22 still needed work on the balance between high-speed and low-speed sections — with Wache echoing that the team needed to find more performance in the slower corners.

For Hadjar, the priority is simpler and more urgent: recover the set-up ground lost between sessions and get the car back to at least the level it showed in FP1. “We need to sit down and see what we can do because the car made a massive step down. We need to bring it back, at least to the level it was this morning,” he said.

Hadjar took some encouragement from Verstappen’s more positive read on the RB22’s underlying pace, and remained hopeful that fresh set-up changes could turn the situation around before qualifying.