Double points finish for Red Bull at F1 race in Barcelona

Red Bull took a double points finish at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix with Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar finishing in the top 6.

Verstappen finished 4th, while teammate Hadjar recovered from a slow start to finish 6th, albeit in a race where both drivers gained positions after late DNFs for other drivers.

The result means that Verstappen sits 7th in the Driver’s Championship after 7 races of the 2026 F1 season with 55 points, while teammate Hadjar sits 9th with 34 points.

The Milton Keynes-based Red Bull Racing team sit 4th in the Constructors’ Championship on 89 points, with the team 52 points behind 3rd placed McLaren and 29 ahead of 5th place Alpine.

In the first of 2 F1 races this year in Spain, the two Red Bulls had prepared to start the race from the third row of the grid after qualifying 5th and 6th.

Verstappen and Hadjar had very contrasting fortunes when the race started. While Verstappen held off Oscar Piastri and had a few looks at the world champion’s McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri, Hadjar had major wheelspin and plummeted down the order from 6th at the start to 15th by the end of the first lap.

After that, the race became one of damage recovery from Hadjar, who quickly set to work rising through the field after a series of battles with various midfield machines and he was back in the top 10 by lap 20.

Verstappen spent much of his race in a world of his own, not fast enough to keep up with the top 4 but quick to stay ahead of Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari and Piastri’s McLaren. Hadjar, meanwhile, would soon find himself in a similar situation, where he found himself in 8th position.

Despite a virtual safety car after Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin broke down, it looked like 5th and 8th would be where the two Red Bulls finished. But there was a very late sting in the tale as two of the top six suffered breakdowns with 4 laps of the race to go.

The first was championship leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli, as the Mercedes driver saw his car stutter to a halt on lap 62 just over a lap after he’d passed his Mercedes teammate George Russell. That was enough to bump Verstappen and Hadjar up to 4th and 7th, but at the same time, a power unit failure saw Leclerc retire from 6th, pushing Hadjar up a further place to take a top six finish.

While Red Bull didn’t get the luck for a podium, there was a bonus for the team as for the first time, all 4 cars powered by Red Bull’s new in-house power unit Red Bull Power Trains finished in the points, with the two Racing Bulls finishing 9th and 10th.

Red Bull will look to go again at the next F1 race, which takes place at the Red Bull Ring for the Austrian Grand Prix in 2 weeks time.