Isack Hadjar will miss a third consecutive race weekend, with Red Bull confirming that the wrist injury which kept him out of Zandvoort and Monza has not healed sufficiently for the Spanish Grand Prix at Madrid’s new Madring circuit. Liam Lawson continues in the seat, with Yuki Tsunoda returning to duty at Racing Bulls.
For Hadjar, the timing is cruel: he was promoted to a first career podium only last week, when the FIA‘s appeal court retrospectively rewrote the Monaco result in his favour — a trophy earned in May, awarded in September, and celebrated in a physio room. Red Bull has been careful not to put a return date on his recovery, and the vacancy conversation around its junior programme is growing louder.
Williams, meanwhile, provided the week’s most welcome distraction, unveiling a striking retro livery for Madrid based on its 1981 design — a nod to the team’s first constructors’ championship era that will make Carlos Sainz’s home race visually unmissable. Sainz, adding his own touch, will run his original helmet design for his first home Grand Prix in the Spanish capital.
The legal residue of Monza continues to settle. Audi has formally signalled its intention to appeal the stewards’ decision that allowed Tsunoda to keep his Italian GP point after a restart infringement investigation — an otherwise minor result made significant by how tight the midfield championship battle has become.
And at Mercedes, the internal review of the Monza weekend continues, with the team acknowledging it will examine the wheel-to-wheel moments between George Russell and Kimi Antonelli that Toto Wolff admitted “could have ended in disaster”. Russell, for his part, confirmed he will take no grid penalty in Madrid. Small mercies.
The quiet stories worth tracking
Beneath the headline items, three threads deserve attention. Hadjar’s extended absence is quietly reshaping Red Bull’s 2027 deliberations: Lawson’s audition now spans enough races to constitute real evidence, and the junior programme’s queue behind them grows less patient by the week. The Audi appeal, trivial in points, is a live test of how aggressively a manufacturer newcomer will work the sport’s legal machinery — an early read on the institutional character of F1’s newest power bloc.
And the Williams livery, easy to file under marketing, carries more signal than it seems: a team confident enough in its trajectory to invoke its championship history is a team that believes the comparison will soon flatter rather than embarrass it. Heritage is a dangerous thing to reference from the midfield. Williams clearly no longer thinks of itself as living there.
Reporting sources: RacingNews365, Crash.net, Motorsport.com, RaceFans
