Yuki Tsunoda was tight-lipped over why he complained to Red Bull on his radio after qualifying.
“It’s so unfair, honestly,” said Tsunoda on his radio after dropping out in Q2. “I knew that was going to happen like this. I knew it, but…”
After reaching Q2, Tsunoda briefly looked like he was going to accompany his team mate Max Verstappen into Q3. Although he was unable to set a lap time before the session was red-flagged, once it restarted Tsunoda produced a time good enough for 10th.
Tsunoda still had time for one more lap, but his final effort was over half a second slower. Isack Hadjar and Esteban Ocon beat his best time and Tsunoda was eliminated in 12th.
But when Tsunoda was asked after qualifying what went wrong, he indicated he was at least as unhappy about the beginning of his session as he was the end of it.
“It’s not just the last push, it’s just [the] start of Q2,” Tsunoda told the official F1 channel. “But it’s okay. I know what’s happened and I don’t have to talk here.”
Asked whether he would discuss the matter further with the team, Tsunoda replied: “Let’s see.”
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Tsunoda appears to have been unhappy about Red Bull’s instruction for him to let Verstappen by at the beginning of Q2. The call came while they were queued in the pit lane with Tsunoda ahead of his team mate.
“Yuki, it’s a request, can you please let Max past up the hill, let Max past up the hill, he’s directly behind you,” said his race engineer Richard Wood. “He’s on a different run plan to us.” After they swapped places Wood told Tsunoda: “Thanks very much.”
Their run plans differed in that Verstappen set a flying lap immediately after leaving the pits, unlike Tsunoda, who did a slow ‘build’ lap before making his first attempt at a lap time. This meant the red flag triggered by George Russell’s stoppage affected the two drivers differently: Verstappen had already set his first time when it came out, while Tsunoda had not.
What was Red Bull’s reason for swapping the positions of their two cars? It appears they did not join the fast lane of the pits in the intended order.
Both cars were lowered from their jacks at the same time as Q2 began, but Verstappen’s was raised again, apparently due to some sort of problem. That meant Tsunoda joined the fast lane of the pits before his team mate.
Both drivers had done ‘build laps’ before their first flying runs in Q1, but only Tsunoda did in Q2. The difference in their strategies, the request to let Verstappen by and the unfortunate timing of the Q2 red flag clearly irked Tsunoda.
As a result, Tsunoda recorded his third absence from Q3 since he joined Red Bull six rounds ago.
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