How Tsunoda has proved himself as RB’s team leader  in F1

On the evening of 29 October 2023, Yuki Tsunoda felt completely destroyed. He locked himself in his hotel room and wouldn’t come out until the next morning. He knew he’d screwed up.

“I just had to breathe,” he says, leaning back in his chair 
and exhaling as he reveals to GP Racing the torment of last
year’s Mexican Grand Prix. “I wasn’t really thinking about the team. I was probably thinking only about myself. I was trying to catch and overtake Daniel – just for myself, just to prove it.”

Until lap 49 he’d had an amazing race. From 19th on the grid he was
up to 14th by lap two, eighth when Kevin Magnussen’s crash prompted a red flag on lap 34. New tyres, 35 more laps to the end, no more pitstops. Just bring the car home and four points with it. But Tsunoda didn’t want
points – he wanted to beat Daniel Ricciardo. Because he knew he was quicker. And he wanted everyone else to know it too.

The team’s late-season upgrade push had started to pay off and in Mexico, AlphaTauri (now RB) was particularly strong – enabling Daniel
to claim an incredible fourth on the grid. Tsunoda had been quicker than
his team-mate in FP3 but simply didn’t get the chance to show what
he could’ve done in qualifying, thanks to an engine-change penalty.

“I was frustrated,” Tsunoda admits. “Unfortunately or fortunately, in that race, it was probably the best car we had the whole year. We struggled so much in the first half of the season, and now he’s got the best car in the best timing – and I couldn’t show that performance.

“That kind of clicked me to rush in the race to try to overtake him. If I think now, calmly, had I ended up P8 starting from P19 – it’s still a great result. But I didn’t think about it at that point, because I was just too focused on proving to the team, to all the people, that I’m the better driver.”

Spinning in battle with Piastri was among the low moments of Tsunoda's 2023 season

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

It’s probably not easy to be Daniel Ricciardo’s team-mate. He’s charismatic, funny, good with the media, and even when he’s slow he knows how to make it sound like he actually isn’t –
to sow a seed of doubt that there’s something else going on. But when he’s fast he makes
sure everyone notices. Remember Mexico 2018, when Daniel took pole by 0.026s over Max Verstappen and then bugged Max further by celebrating “as if he’d become world champion”?

Ricciardo’s qualifying performance at the same track five years later was seen as a sign of him getting closer to turning this stint with Red Bull’s junior squad into a ticket back to the first team. Paddock groupthink then determined it was only a matter of time, provided Ricciardo could consistently beat his team-mate until a vacancy at Red Bull Racing arose.

Screaming pitch

But imagine you’re Tsunoda in that scenario. You’ve made clear, near-linear progress over two and a half years with the junior team, you were almost as quick as Pierre Gasly by the end of your second season, and you’ve just made a Formula E champion look like a non-entity. Yet you’re now seen as a measurement tool for Ricciardo by pretty much everyone, including the influential Helmut Marko. If Ricciardo beats you – he goes to Red Bull. If he doesn’t – well, he is probably not as good as he used to be.

Instead of a statement, the F1 world got another confirmation of its assumptions: Tsunoda will crash, then he’ll get on the
radio to shout

Catching and overtaking Ricciardo that Sunday in Mexico – and from the last row on the grid – would have been a great statement. Unfortunately nobody had kept Oscar Piastri in the loop about its importance.

A few laps after the restart only Piastri’s McLaren stood between Tsunoda and his team-mate. Sixth-placed Ricciardo was still in sight – yet slowly building a gap. If he wanted to beat the Australian here, Tsunoda had to get a
move on… but after a long wheel-banging battle, he overcommitted into Turn 1, touched the uncooperative McLaren yet again, and was pitched into a spin.

Instead of a statement, the F1 world got another confirmation of its assumptions: Tsunoda will crash, then he’ll get on the
radio to shout. All that was left for him to do
was to lock himself in a room and internalise this latest lesson.

That image of a screaming and crashing
Tsunoda was formed in the first half of his first season. While now he can be used as a prime exemplar of Franz Tost’s famous “a driver needs three years to show his full potential” truism, F1 isn’t exactly the place where opinions are always based on thorough, long-term analysis. Perception is all.

Tsunoda has emerged on the other side of his chastening experience in Mexico as an improved driver

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

Thus a successful 2021 grand prix debut in Bahrain was almost immediately overshadowed by a scrappy weekend in Imola where he effed and blinded on the radio about “traffic paradise” (a Japanese term for street closures) in practice, then shunted in Q1. The image of a fast but erratic driver, prone to venting his spleen
from the cockpit, became crystallised.

“Yeah, I remember it,” smiles the team’s technical director Jody Egginton as GP Racing sits down with him three years on from that crash in the same paddock in Imola. “I can say
it now: it was unnecessary. The car was quick,
he was quick.

“If you think about his first year, we’d had quite a good winter testing with him and he showed a lot of potential early on – and that was valid. But we weren’t putting it together. It’s okay to be quick. But what we’ve got to do is put a weekend together.”

Incident magnate

Not only did Tsunoda keep getting caught up in incidents after that, but the speed had gone. And then the confidence followed. He still harbours doubts, though, about what was actually damaged first: his self-belief or the chassis. The initial inspection after the crash turned up no issues and Tsunoda kept using the same car for the next few months, until he started to question the reasons behind an ever-present gap to Pierre Gasly.

“Don’t get me wrong, 100% there was my side, that I wasn’t able to perform well in the first half of season,” he says. “But at the same time, I felt the rear end was weak: as I was turning it would slide too much – since that crash in Imola. And then [it showed] on lap time, I was always six-seven tenths behind Pierre.

“The worst was in Russia. In FP1, even if my lap felt good, I was almost 1.5 seconds off. So, after around ten races I started to have this question mark about my chassis, I started to speak with the engineers.”

AlphaTauri never did uncover a chassis problem, but Tsunoda eventually got a new one ahead of the race in Turkey.

“It was the first time for me, and Pierre drove there the year before,” he says, “but from
FP1 [onwards] I was able to match his lap time,
it was never like seven-eight tenths [again].
And the last three races, I started to feel like
[I had] a normal car.”

A change of chassis for Turkey in 2021 was Tsunoda believes a turning point in his fortunes

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Whether there was some otherwise undetectable issue with the previous chassis or this was simply a case of the placebo effect, we will never know for sure.

“He’s not the first driver in F1 to have that feeling,” says Egginton. “And I can see where it comes from: we changed the chassis, the results improved. But there have been many instances of chassis not being changed and results improving. At the end of the day, it’s important to listen to the drivers – and in this team we do listen.”

One thing’s for certain: Tsunoda is adamant his first-year struggles helped him grow as a driver.

"The results I showed in 2022 were okay, but it wasn’t enough to convince them I could be a kind of leader. So, my targets kind of changed a little bit"
Yuki Tsunoda

“I tried to change everything to make it work somehow because I never struggled as much before in my career,” he recalls. “And in the
end, I just went back to everything I did in
the first race.

“Because I struggled so much,
I discovered a lot of things about myself. I
think I experienced almost everything in that first year. And in terms of progress, I would 
say that was a very important year.”

A Gasly business

Tsunoda ended his rookie season with a fourth-place finish in Abu Dhabi. Had that race run a lap longer, he might have overtaken Carlos Sainz for third. But even without that it marked the first weekend where he was ahead of Gasly in both qualifying and the race.

It foreshadowed a better 2022. After a 21-1 qualifying defeat in his rookie season, Tsunoda
was able to run with Gasly more consistently – and he boldly claims that towards the second part of the season he was the quicker of the AlphaTauri drivers.

“In the dry, I was probably faster than him most of the time,” he says. “I would say then I was still not really good in the rain or, you know, changeable conditions – and that year we had a lot of these dry-wet sessions, and I wasn’t performing well enough, and I knew that.
That was my weakness.”

Tsunoda believes that by the end of his second year with Gasly he was a match for the Frenchman in dry conditions

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

This time the qualifying score was a much more respectable 13-9 (still in Gasly’s favour). And, excluding the wet sessions, Tsunoda’s average one-lap deficit to Gasly was just 0.024s. He scored 12 points to Pierre’s 23, but that gap is largely the result of the Baku round, where Gasly finished fifth and Tsunoda’s DRS failed while he was running seventh.

“I had a lot of races where I lost points with the situations I couldn’t control,” Tsunoda says,
“and I think if I include that race in Baku, probably I would end up with the same points
or slightly higher.”

Egginton is slightly less convinced of that but readily admits Tsunoda “was making big progress” during year two.

“He pushed Pierre harder, without a doubt,” he says. “But I’d flip the story around and say Pierre probably pushed him hard. If you’ve got another team-mate who was new to the business, maybe he [Yuki] would have progressed at a different rate. I saw a lot of positives in Pierre pushing him and being very open. He’s a better driver through working with Pierre, for sure.”

And while the team didn’t get the chance to see how they’d compare in a third year together, as Gasly departed to Alpine, Tsunoda’s start of
2023 was good enough to end his replacement team-mate’s F1 career after just 10 races.

Taking charge

Gasly’s departure to Alpine presented Tsunoda with an opportunity.

“It was good for me,” he says. “Obviously, because of what he [Gasly] achieved with the team – and he deserved it – I feel like the team was relying on him. But also, it was the situation I wanted to be in myself in the future.

“When Nyck [de Vries] came, the team probably didn’t know which driver is faster, and I’ll be completely honest, [ahead of the] first race in 2023, for the team to rely fully on me would have been too early. The results I showed in 2022 were okay, but it wasn’t enough to convince them I could be a kind of leader. So, my targets kind of changed a little bit – at that point, [I felt] like, OK, now it’s time to prove myself that I can be the driver who they can rely on.”

After a shining cameo for Williams a Monza in 2022, de Vries was brought into the fold for 2023 but overshadowed by Tsunoda and shown the door

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

“He worked hard,” Egginton confirms. “There was a period when I’d get to the factory and Yuki was there every day. I’ve never seen the driver at the factory so much. So yes, he was getting better.

“Brazil 2023 jumps out to me. 2021 Yuki – and maybe ’22 as well – wasn’t great in Brazil. And I was nervous in ’23. I remember telling the engineers, ‘We’ve got to get him through this one.’ But he was fantastic from the off [sixth in the sprint and ninth in the grand prix] and he didn’t need any help. So I was really impressed with that.”

The perception Tsunoda has raised his game again in 2024 is probably accurate. Yet there’s arguably nothing surprising about him being faster than Ricciardo – this was evidently the case by the end of 2023. What’s different this year is Tsunoda’s consistency.

There’s still some anger management work to be done, as Tsunoda’s in-lap actions in Bahrain demonstrated. But his 2024 campaign has
left no doubt he’s now the stronger of the two
Faenza team drivers

“His pace was always there,” Egginton says. “What he’s doing now is he’s putting weekends together. When you’re a young driver coming
in it’s probably not easy to get your head around what’s important and who’s important, and
what information needs to be transmitted.
He’s doing that now. And I think that comes across in his communications over the radio
in the race as well.”

And his confidence – shaken by that troubled first year – is also back.

“I very much trust myself [now], a lot,” says Tsunoda, who will remain with RB next year after Red Bull handed Sergio Perez a two-year contract extension. “Compared with the time I was struggling, it feels different. And it affects everything else: how I approach race week.

“If you feel confident, you don’t have to think about anything other than driving. I feel like [when I had a good result] it used to be, ‘OK, maybe I was lucky or something’. Now I don’t feel that way – I just
feel like I deserve it. I feel much stronger.”

There’s still some anger management work to be done, as Tsunoda’s in-lap actions in Bahrain demonstrated. But his 2024 campaign has
left no doubt he’s now the stronger of the two
Faenza team drivers – and he didn’t need a miracle in Mexico to prove it. Beating his
current team-mate in almost all the other
grands prix they’ve spent with the same machinery has been more than enough.

Tsunoda has impressed too against Ricciardo, although it wasn't enough to replace Perez in the top team

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images