The Spa headline was Max Verstappen's podium. The drive Red Bull will remember, though, came from Isack Hadjar. Sent to 21st on the grid by a stacked 30-place engine penalty, the rookie fought back to sixth - and team principal Laurent Mekies reached straight for the superlatives.
"I think it is his best race. It is the best race with us, no question," Mekies said. "It's not only a spike, it has been just a little bit better every single race for speed. So he's bringing some speed every time he's driving."
The recovery leaned on an aggressive plan - two stops early, then back onto the hard tyre - that a well-timed Virtual Safety Car turned into a pass on Norris. "His pace was top-three pace, so I'm very happy with his progress," Mekies said, adding that Hadjar had looked "very, very fast from FP1". The stopwatch agreed: only Norris and race-winner Kimi Antonelli lapped quicker than Hadjar on his best tour.
Not everyone read it as an unqualified triumph. The Race's Edd Straw rated the weekend highly but tempered the numbers, writing that a "podium was potentially on the cards without the grid penalty that shaped his weekend" while warning the "climb to sixth was not quite as dramatic as the 15 places gained suggested". Straw also credited a moment that went largely unnoticed - Hadjar towing Verstappen onto the front row in Q3 before his own penalty dropped him down the order.
Peter Windsor apportioned the credit differently again. In his race review, the analyst suggested Verstappen had been "a little bit bashful" in crediting Hadjar for that tow, reckoning the Dutchman's own sector-two work earned the grid slot as much as the slipstream. Windsor still rated the recovery from the back highly and liked the hard-medium-hard strategy behind it.
On Formula1.com, Jolyon Palmer called it Hadjar's "best race weekend yet" and treated it as proof of Red Bull's broader 2026 gains - notable given the team had dropped its 'Macarena'-style rear wing for an older design to survive Spa's efficiency demands.
Mekies, for his part, refused to get carried away. Red Bull is still "suffering... on an energy-starving track", he admitted. "We have some homework to do to progress at this sort of track as well. We don't think we have discovered all the tricks," he said, promising to "soon find out if Budapest will give us a bit of an upside or not" at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
With Verstappen's future dominating every paddock conversation, Hadjar getting better "every single race", in Mekies' words, is becoming the most reassuring thread of Red Bull's difficult campaign.
