Isack Hadjar broke a bone in his wrist while training during the 2026 Formula 1 summer break, forcing him to sit out the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort and requiring Red Bull and Racing Bulls to reshuffle their driver line-ups.
The will-he-won’t-he question of his return then provided fodder for headlines in the following weeks as he skipped the next two rounds at the recommendation of MotoGP ace Marc Marquez – a man who is no stranger to having various parts of his body held together by steel pins.
The topic of how Hadjar came to be injured was also a topic of intense speculation. At Zandvoort it emerged through sources close to the team that he had done it while boxing, although Hadjar himself didn’t openly confirm that until after finishing on the podium in Baku last weekend.
“It’s been a moment now,” he said in the post-race press conference. “I felt like I had, like, a whole winter break, which is not really what you want in the middle of the season. So, yeah, I definitely missed it.
“You know, the adrenaline, those Q3 laps, the restart, and, yeah, it’s good to be back fighting with the other drivers. It’s what I love to do. So hopefully I use a bit more my brain when I go boxing next time.”
Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, Isack Hadjar, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images
Before this point he had avoided the subject of how the injury occurred. Asked in the Wednesday press conference if the team had banned him from boxing while training in future, Hadjar merely said: “Next time I’ll be more careful.”
Neither Hadjar nor the Red Bull team had revealed details of the injury, prompting a host of reports offering speculation of what it might be. On Wednesday in Baku, Hadjar described at as “a small fracture on the outside of the wrist, and it’s quite a long process”. This is inconsistent with the widespread claims that Hadjar had a fractured scaphoid, since this is on the inside of the wrist, behind the thumb.
Wrist injuries tend to take longer to heal because that area is in constant use, putting the carpal bones under stress even when not engaged in vigorous activity such as sports. This is highly disruptive to the healing process and can even prevent fractures from knitting back together properly – hence the recommendation to sportspeople to abstain from training during the process.
The usual timeline for recovery is for the affected wrist to be in a splint for six weeks, so Hadjar has returned to the cockpit at the earliest realistic opportunity. It’s likely he’ll continue to feel discomfort for several weeks.
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