Hadjar sarcastic about Red Bull as the benchmark engine: 'Have we won every race?

He told GPblog and other media in Barcelona ahead of the Spanish GP as this website has already reported that the FIA had shared the preliminary figures and had assessed that Red Bull is the team with the best internal combustion engine.

Yet during the Monaco Grand Prix, Hadjar struggled with engine problems, after his teammate had already failed to get off the line due to a power unit issue.

Hadjar had to pull up the stats when he was told the ADUO news. “I first checked whether we had won the first six races of the year, you know. And we haven’t,” Hadjar says with a small laugh.

So far a Mercedes engine has won all the races, including sprint races. Besides George Russell and Kimi Antonelli, Lando Norris has won a sprint race for McLaren — which runs a Mercedes power unit. “They are preliminary statements,” Hadjar continues. “Nothing has been officially confirmed yet. When the time comes for final decisions to be made, we’ll see what is said. Beyond that, I have no comment.”

On Sunday in Monaco, Hadjar certainly didn’t feel like he had the benchmark engine on the grid in his car. It was a frustrating race for him, in which he couldn’t run at full power. “We analyzed the problem thoroughly. By now we know what went wrong, and it shouldn’t happen again,” he says. On the team radio his engineer said they were looking for a solution, only to report a few minutes later that they couldn’t find one.

“Of course we’re only six races into the project and we’re still in the development phase of a completely new engine. That’s why these kinds of problems sometimes happen. You actually need to experience and understand these mistakes so they don’t occur again in the future,” Hadjar concludes.