Isack Hadjar, Racing Bulls, Zandvoort, 2025

Isack Hadjar was overjoyed but exhausted after claiming his first podium finish in the Dutch Grand Prix.

The Racing Bulls driver started fourth and ran there throughout the race, but moved up to third place when Lando Norris retired seven laps from home.

Hadjar said he was “completely destroyed” by the effort of bringing his Racing Bulls home in third place. He admitted that before the race he was thinking more about how to avoid losing too many places than whether he could finish even higher than he started.

“I was being very realistic at the start of the race,” he told the official Formula 1 channel. “I was [trying to] just keep my position at the start and then not fall too much in the ranking.”

However he discovered “the pace was much stronger than I expected” once the race started. “Then at some point I was like, okay, I can finish fourth here.”

He was on course to finish fourth when second-placed Norris suffered a power unit problem on his McLaren. “Obviously with what happened with Lando, I knew I had the car pace to be on the podium and hold my position, and that’s what we did,” he said. “But it was hard not to make any mistakes.”

At 20 years old, Hadjar is the fifth-youngest driver in F1 history to reach the podium. He is the youngest French driver to do so, and revealed he has already received congratulations from France’s most successful driver.

“It feels good,” he said, “Alain Prost just texted me so it feels amazing to beat those kinds of records.”

Prost scored his first podium in 1981 at the age of 26. Until today Pierre Gasly was the youngest French driver to have stood on the podium.

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