Can Tsunoda survive in F1’s toughest seat?

Yuki Tsunoda is ready for the toughest job in motorsports. Or, at least, he believes he is. At 24, with four seasons in Formula 1 plus a strong start to 2025 under his belt, he’s better-prepared for this opportunity than the man he replaced, former teammate Liam Lawson, and backs himself to thrive despite the fact that partnering Max Verstappen at Red Bull Racing is regarded by most as career poison. Tsunoda has nothing to lose. This was destined to be his last year in the Racing Bulls fold, with Red Bull team principal Christian Horner saying last December that after five years in what he called the “support team,” there comes a point where “you’ve either got to let them go at that point or look at something different.” Tsunoda has proved himself worthy of a seat on the F1 grid, but opportunities are limited for ’26 if Red Bull’s B-team does not retain him. The jump to Red Bull presents an opportunity to change the direction of his career, and perhaps even establish himself in a front-running team for the long term. It’s a big ask, given that not only is he being pitched into a seat regarded by most as the toughest in F1 but also doing so with no prior experience of the car, two races into a season, and for his home grand prix. The devotion of the home crowd and the desire of circuit owner Honda for him to thrive means the pressure will be intense, and how Tsunoda deals with that could set him up for success or failure at Red Bull. He will get more than the ludicrous two weekends afforded to Lawson, but the die will likely be cast one way or the other at Suzuka. Red Bull will soon turn its attention to identifying a replacement for ’26 if Tsunoda doesn’t convince – and convince quickly. This is a fascinating challenge considering sources within Red Bull have long made it clear that question marks over Tsunoda’s mentality, more than his driving ability, led to him repeatedly being passed over for promotion. This all started when Tsunoda first tested for what was then called AlphaTauri in the post-season Abu Dhabi test in 2020 and the team was astonished by how vocal and emotional his communications were over the radio. It is something Tsunoda has, by his own admission, had to work on. However, the perception has become increasingly anachronistic as Tsunoda has improved what he calls his “emotional control” significantly. The last time there was a notable problem was in the Bahrain Grand Prix in 2024, when team orders frustrated him late on and he made a statement with an odd lunge and lockup past Daniel Ricciardo on the slowdown lap. Since then, Tsunoda has been in a better place, aside from using an ableist slur during Austrian Grand Prix qualifying, for which he offered “big apologies,” as well as paying a substantial fine. But unacceptable language aside, too often legitimate pushbacks to team instructions are interpreted as problematic when they shouldn’t be. The most recent example was in the Chinese Grand Prix, when he was right to demand he work the front end harder and didn’t accept the pit wall telling him not to. Shortly afterwards, his reasoning was understood and the team backed the decision. Therefore, the idea of a driver who is not working with his team is an outdated one. F1 has been a steep learning curve for Tsunoda. When he arrived in 2021, finishing ninth on debut in Bahrain, he had a single season in each of European F3 and F2 under his belt and was still very much a work in progress. He confessed to underestimating how tough the step up to F1 would be, and his first season was a chastening experience with too many mistakes. But he gradually learned, to the point where he was able to become the team’s spearhead once Pierre Gasly left for Alpine at the end of 2022. He’s now a far more dependable driver, and any patchiness in his results is more down to his team’s inconsistency than his own shortcomings. The first two weekends of this year have illustrated that. In Australia, he ran in the top six until the rain returned on lap 44. The team flip-flopped on strategy, leaving him out for too long while other teams called their cars in, turning a strong result into a pointless afternoon. A similar thing happened in the Chinese Grand Prix, where Racing Bulls stuck with a two-stop strategy as others adapted to one. Only his strong run to sixth in the Shanghai Sprint rewarded him with points in a season where he has been a standout performer. The question now is whether he can translate his superb form at Racing Bulls into Red Bull Racing driving a faster, but much trickier, car. To make his promotion work, Tsunoda must at least partially replicate Verstappen’s skill for extracting the potential from a difficult car. The Red Bull RB21 has plenty of downforce and grip; the trouble is accessing its potential consistently due to its balance limitations. Success or failure in doing so makes the difference between it being a podium threat and being at risk of elimination in Q1. Verstappen’s extraordinary ability is to drive the car in a way that minimizes the limitations and makes the most of that potential. In qualifying especially, Verstappen’s otherworldly ability to manipulate the car on the brakes and turn-in is what unlocks its performance. The RB21 is prone to both understeer and rear-end snaps, but Verstappen can load the front axle at turn-in to give it the front end grip it needs without the rear stepping out of line. Doing so requires remarkable sensitivity, precision, adaptability and the capacity to react near-instantaneously to the feedback from the car. It’s the F1 equivalent of walking the tightrope. By contrast, Lawson has fallen repeatedly and therefore driving to a much lower ceiling – hence his references to the difficulty of finding “the sweet spot” with this car. This isn’t simply the problem of a car developed for Verstappen, who thrives with a strong front end and can control the resulting rear-end instability most find too responsive. While such dynamics have the potential for the highest performance ceiling, this requires astonishing talent to control. Yet with the RB21, Verstappen faces an even tougher challenge with a car he says “is still not where I want it to be.” His driving is a delicate form of bullying that is beyond most. So can Tsunoda do what Verstappen does? It’s unlikely, given Verstappen is, at 27, already established as one of the all-time greats and few drivers in the history of grand prix racing have his ability. The more pertinent question is whether Tsunoda can approximate the Verstappen technique enough to do the job Red Bull needs. That’s usually framed by the team as being about three-tenths off and banking regular points – although as a racing driver with unshakable confidence, Tsunoda himself will doubtless back himself to do far more than that. There is a reference point, which is the post-season Abu Dhabi test last year. Tsunoda logged 127 laps in the 2024 Red Bull, which was less an opportunity offered by Red Bull and more one facilitated by power unit supplier Honda, which has backed Tsunoda since his early days in single-seaters. There, Tsunoda claimed to feel comfortable in the car and able to push it to the limit. “I think so — I didn’t really struggle much to adapt,” said Tsunoda. “I didn’t have many dirty laps. On the long runs, I have been able to run consistently and straight away felt the limitations of the car, which if you don’t have confidence in the car, you can’t feel any limitations.” Although Tsunoda showed what he could do, the die had already been cast and Red Bull’s decision was made – Lawson was going to replace Sergio Perez, subject to the payoff being finalized with the Mexican. The willingness to make the swap with Lawson so early in the season confirms that Tsunoda did a good job in Abu Dhabi. Tsunoda is definitely better qualified for the challenge than he would have been a couple of years ago and is promoted to Red Bull Racing with the kind of experience two of his predecessors, Alex Albon and Pierre Gasly, had. Tsunoda is, by inclination, a late braker. When I asked him about that in November 2023, this is how he described his style: “Stronger and fast,” said Tsunoda. “The initial part is stronger. I’ve never seen a driver where the initial part is stronger than me. The releasing part, the later part, he is good at. I can learn something from that as a driver.” This was a significant phase of Tsunoda’s development, one that broadened his window. While his original F1 teammate, Gasly, is also by inclination a late braker, one who thrives attacking the corner provided that the rear end is predictable enough to give him confidence, Ricciardo showed Tsunoda another way. That’s expanded Tsunoda’s toolkit as a driver and, critically, given him a deeper understanding of the value of manipulating the car’s balance using the brakes. To do what Verstappen does, braking late is not an option as it just means struggling to get the car turned. Then you are limited on traction when you try to feed the power in thanks to the extra lock required to get the car through the rest of the corner. Tsunoda at least has a grounding in how to try and achieve this. The pressure is on, but this is potentially life-changing opportunity for Tsunoda, who can transform himself from handy midfielder to frontrunner. In terms of experience, the timing is right even if it would have been better to give him a winter and pre-season to prepare, but this is the opportunity he craves to prove he can do what Gasly, Albon, Perez and Lawson failed to do before him. If Tsunoda delivers, and that doesn’t mean matching Verstappen but simply being a useful number two for Red Bull, then this could be a career-making opportunity. If not, it will be a career-breaking one, but at least he’ll have had the belated chance to show what he can do in the least hospitable seat in F1.