Isack Hadjar credits a cartoon for his obsession with F1: ‘That’s my earliest memory’

Most Formula 1 drivers trace their obsession back to a race they watched as children, a karting session at a local circuit or a parent who put them behind the wheel at an age when most kids were still learning to ride bikes.

Isack Hadjar’s story starts somewhere slightly different. It starts with a Disney film.

“I think my parents had bought the DVD,” the Red Bull driver recalled in an interview with Formula1.com.

“There was a menu on screen. I have a clear image in my head of that menu, with Lightning McQueen on it. You could see him from behind and there were options like start, change language, that kind of thing. That is my first memory.”

The film was Cars, the 2006 Pixar animation that follows a hotshot racing car on his journey from arrogance to maturity.

For the young Hadjar, growing up in Paris to an Algerian family, the image of that DVD menu was the spark. He was around two years old at the time.

What followed was not an immediate obsession with Formula 1 specifically, but a broader love of cars and speed that defined his childhood from the very beginning.

“Honestly, since I can remember, I have just always loved cars in general,” he said.

“I always had toy cars. It was not really about Formula 1 or driving, more about the love of cars and speed in general.”

The transition from toy cars to real ones came at the age of seven, when Isack Hadjar first sat in a kart. The connection was immediate. “I was completely hooked straight away,” he explained.

“My father quickly saw that I was comfortable. It was not like football. I was not very good at that, but in racing I was. So I knew pretty much right away that this was it.”

His former teammate and fellow Cars fan Liam Lawson has spoken of a similar childhood attachment to the film, making the pair an unlikely shared footnote in animated cinema history.

School on Monday, kart race on Sunday

Hadjar’s parents supported his racing ambitions without needing to be convinced, but they attached one firm condition. School had to come first. Or more precisely, school and racing had to come equally.

“Honestly, I did not have to convince them,” he said. “I just had to do both at a high level.”

That balance was demanding for a young child. Race weekends were followed immediately by school weeks, with little time to recover between the two. “It was very tiring as a child,” he admitted.

“I actually do not have the best memories of that period in karting, because I would come home on Sunday after a tough weekend and on Monday morning I had a test.”

Despite having struggled to even push fully on the pedals early in his career owing to his low height, Hadjar went on to win his first single-seater race at Spa in the French F4 Championship at the age of just 14.

The discipline that the dual commitment of school and racing had forced on him proved to be more useful than it initially felt.

Discipline that still helps him today

Looking back, Hadjar does not see those exhausting years as a sacrifice. He sees them as preparation.

“I had to be good at both things I was doing,” he said. “Later, when we could see it was becoming serious, the focus slowly started to shift a little more.”

As a full Formula 1 driver alongside one of the sport’s greatest ever champions, Hadjar now sees a direct line between the structured childhood he had and the demands the sport places on him every weekend.

“I think the discipline with school and everything has helped me in a certain way, and still does,” he said. “It is a complicated sport. You spend the whole day talking with engineers, so it can only help you.”

Hadjar has so far been the first driver since Daniel Ricciardo to appear to have a vice-like grip on racing Red Bull’s unique and challenging cars, comfortably avoiding the fate of the long line of drivers who have struggled to live with Verstappen since 2019.

His former race engineer at Racing Bulls described him as standing out for his ability to understand the car immediately at new circuits and extract performance even without extensive preparation.