Red Bull's slide down the 2026 Formula 1 pecking order has a new, painfully honest explanation — and it has come straight from one of the team's own drivers.
Speaking after the Japanese Grand Prix weekend at Suzuka, Isack Hadjar did not bother sugar-coating the state of the RB22. Asked to sum up what was going wrong with the car, the rookie offered a diagnosis that will sting inside Milton Keynes.
"We have a good power unit. The engine is good. It's just the chassis is terrible. It's slow in the corners," Hadjar said.
It is a striking admission from a driver still building his Formula 1 career, and it cuts across the narrative Red Bull has tried to maintain through a difficult start to the new regulation era. Under the new power unit rules, the Honda-built Red Bull Powertrains engine appears to have kept pace with the grid. The chassis, by Hadjar's own words, has not.
That view has been echoed by independent analysts dissecting Red Bull's weekend-to-weekend form. The host of F1Unchained summarised the pattern across the opening rounds in stark terms.
"They pretty much lose in any corner type. High-speed corners have been horrible. Same with medium speed, but I mean, they've been bad in slow speed as well. It's just a very bad car. It's got no turn-in. They have great straight-line speed and their power unit is right up there," the analyst said.
That combination — quick on the straights, fragile through the corners — is consistent with a chassis that cannot generate clean downforce under load. It also explains why Max Verstappen's trademark recovery drives have become harder to execute. On a layout such as Suzuka, where sustained medium- and high-speed corners dominate a lap, any corner-speed deficit compounds rapidly.
The bigger concern for Red Bull is how entrenched the problem looks. Rumours circulating within the paddock suggest senior figures are openly discussing whether the current concept can be rescued at all.
"This car's so bad. We might just have to go full B-spec and scrap it entirely," F1 Insider's Ralph Buch reported of the internal discussions.
A full B-spec rebuild would be a dramatic concession. It would effectively amount to admitting the 2026 design direction chosen in Milton Keynes was wrong from launch — a significant statement for a team that has dominated the sport for most of the past half-decade.
For now, Red Bull's public line remains that upgrades will close the gap. Ford-powered updates have already arrived on the floor and sidepods, and technical analysts who examined the Friday package at Suzuka described it as sophisticated. But the early running suggested those parts had yet to translate into the lap time needed to match Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari.
Hadjar, fighting for every point in a bruising first full season, clearly does not have the luxury of diplomatic answers. The young Frenchman's verdict — good engine, terrible chassis — may prove to be the clearest short-term summary of Red Bull's 2026 season so far.
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*Originally published on [Formula One News](https://newsformula.one/article/hadjar-red-bull-chassis-terrible-suzuka-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
