Yuki Tsunoda, Red Bull, Imola, 2025

After four years of labouring away at Red Bull’s junior Formula 1 team, Yuki Tsunoda was passed over for promotion at the beginning of the year and Liam Lawson got the seat instead.

Naturally, he was disappointed, but not for long. Within two rounds Red Bull had ejected Lawson and came for Tsunoda. Now it was his time to fully appreciate the truth of Oscar Wilde’s observation that “when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.”

Tsunoda didn’t quite deliver on the potential he showed in the first two rounds, where he qualified a brilliant fifth at Melbourne and took sixth in the spring race at Shanghai. But compared to Lawson he seemed to get a better handle on Red Bull’s slightly faster but far less forgiving car. He may have missed the points on his debut for the team but ninth in Bahrain suggested things were trending in the right direction.

A pair of 10th places followed in two of the next three races, but so did a spate of crashes. One, in Jeddah, was the result of Tsunoda failing to leave sufficient room for a driver overtaking on his outside, an error he’s committed several times this season.

Another crash on his first flying lap in Q1 at Imola totalled his RB21 chassis and left Tusnoda running older-specification hardware for several races afterwards.

Yuki Tsunoda

BestWorst
GP start520 (x2)
GP finish917 (x2)
Points10

That gives some explanation for why his results over his subsequent races were so poor, including last in qualifying at Catalunya and last in the races at the Red Bull Ring and Silverstone. Yes, Tsunoda had only himself to blame for the damage he’d done, but other teams might not have left him so far behind on updates for so long.

Even so, there was no excuse for the carelessness which resulted in a spate of avoidable penalties around the same time. Tsunoda overtook Oscar Piastri under red flags in Canada and collided with Franco Colapinto and Oliver Bearman at the next two rounds.

Belgium brought the promise of a change for the better. After receiving a new floor at the 11th hour – between the sprint race and grand prix qualifying, Tsunoda duly delivered his best qualifying position since joining the team, with seventh. A late pit call on race day cost him a badly-needed points finish.

But in Hungary, it was another tale of turmoil. Although he was only a tenth behind team mate Max Verstappen in Q1, that was also the difference between 11th and 16th in an impossibly tight field, securing his fourth Q1 elimination of the season. His efforts to make progress after starting from the pit lane were not helped by a Gurney flap failure, but 17th was another dismal outcome for a team such as Red Bull.

If Tsunoda can continue to show much closer performance compared to his world champion team mate over the final phase of the season as he did in Spa and the Hungaroring, then the narrative of his season will likely change significantly with it.

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