“I only started earning a living this year”: Hadjar and F1’s rookie pay problem

For a driver who finished runner-up in Formula 2 and then scored points as a Formula 1 rookie, you’d assume the money had been good for a while. Yet Isack Hadjar says the opposite: according to his own account, 2025 was the first year he actually earned a living from racing.

Speaking on French streamer Zack Nani’s show, relayed by Grand Prix Tours and Paddock-GP, Hadjar laid out the blunt truth of the modern ladder.

"I only started earning a living this year, in F1, in 2025."

— Isack Hadjar, speaking to Zack Nani, quoted by Grand Prix Tours and Paddock-GP

Asked if his second place in Formula 2 had brought in money, he didn’t sugar-coat it: “No. It’s a complicated system where you have to pay for your seasons.” He went further: “F3 and F2 are costs you can’t afford. My mother managed to find sponsors to pay for part of the season, and Red Bull covered the rest… Without Red Bull, it would have been over.” That matches Motorsport.com’s long-form profile, which describes his mother Randa using her HR network to raise the budget to move him into single-seaters.

The data shows why that matters. RaceFans has previously highlighted that even a Formula 3 seat can cost around €1m per year, with junior single-seater drives routinely reaching seven-figure sums. Hadjar himself told Motorsport.com he was doing roughly eight karting races a year where a full programme might be 20–24, simply because that was all his family could afford. The delta between the laps you need to do and the laps you can afford is often where careers quietly die.

Now look at what Hadjar actually earns as a rookie. Times of India’s breakdown of 2025 driver salaries lists him and Alpine’s Jack Doohan among the lowest-paid drivers on the grid at around $0.5m for their debut seasons. In the same piece, Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton are described as drawing salaries “reaching up to” about $65m per year.

Forbes’ estimates, reported by F1i, paint a similar picture at the top end: Verstappen at roughly $76m total income from his team in 2025, Hamilton at about $70.5m and world champion Lando Norris at $57.5m, with teenage Mercedes rookie Kimi Antonelli already pegged at $12.5m. Stack that against Hadjar’s $0.5m and you’re looking at a ratio well above 100:1 between the very top earner and one of the poorest-paid full-time drivers on the grid. This delta suggests that while the headline of “F1 driver” implies instant wealth, the early years are still about digging out of a financial hole.

Hadjar’s complaint is not that $0.5m is small in isolation; it’s that it arrives after years in which the family outgoings dwarfed any income. Paddock-GP quotes him describing his early karting memories as “bad” once things got serious, because he was “fighting against kids who have more resources than you” and that in motorsport, “even if your parents are wealthy, you’re invisible.” Anyone can buy football boots, he argues, but progressing beyond entry-level karting is “ridiculous” in cost.

Historically, F1 has sold itself on underdog stories: families like Esteban Ocon’s, which RaceFans recalls living in a caravan to keep his junior career alive. But the economics have tilted further. The same RaceFans piece notes that seats on the single-seater ladder have climbed into seven-figure budgets just as the top of F1 has become more lucrative than ever, with the series posting profits and expanding its calendar.

That imbalance is exactly why the paddock is split over a potential driver salary cap. On one side, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff told The Race that in a cost-capped world – roughly $140m for a team’s 1000 staff – talk of a $30–40m driver-salary allowance is “inadequate” in proportion. His argument is simple: if teams must squeeze everyone else under a hard ceiling, it’s hard to justify tens of millions for two drivers remaining completely uncapped.

On the other side, drivers argue that capping the stars would make life even harder for those trying to follow Hadjar’s path.

“In all the junior categories, you see how many of those drivers have a sponsor or a backer… I think it’s going to limit that a lot because they will never get their return in money if you get a cap. So it will hurt all the junior categories as well… For me, it’s completely wrong.”

— Max Verstappen, speaking in Baku, quoted by RaceFans

Valtteri Bottas echoed the point to RaceFans: investors already take a big risk funding a junior career; if the upside in F1 is artificially capped, fewer will gamble in the first place. In other words, the very mechanism that might make spending on current megastars more “rational” could further dry up funding for the next Hadjar coming through karting.

So F1’s rookie pay problem is really a pipeline problem. The data shows a ladder where junior categories extract seven-figure budgets, most F2 and F3 drivers are not salaried at all, and even a promising F2 runner-up like Hadjar reaches F1 still effectively in the red. Teams, operating under a strict cost cap, have little incentive to raise rookie base salaries when there is a queue of equally hungry talents behind them. Meanwhile the proven race-winners at the top of the grid command salaries tens of times higher because they move TV ratings, sponsorship and, crucially, championship points.

Hadjar himself is about to experience the other side of that equation. Paddock-GP, citing Business Booking GP, reports that his promotion to Red Bull alongside Verstappen in 2026 will come with a salary in the region of €6.6m per season – roughly an order of magnitude higher than his Racing Bulls rookie deal. Then vs now, that’s the moment his personal balance sheet flips decisively into the black. But it only happens after he has cleared every sporting and financial hurdle the system throws up.

The broader implication for the championship is stark. If only those able to survive years of negative cashflow and secure backing from an academy or wealthy sponsors ever reach the point where $0.5m counts as a first “living wage”, the talent pool is being filtered by wealth long before F1’s stopwatch has its say. Fixing that won’t be as simple as capping or uncapping the top salaries. It means asking a harder question: in a sport awash with money at the top, why does someone as successful as Isack Hadjar have to wait until his rookie F1 season to stop paying to be there?