Autobayng News Team
How should we interpret Red Bull’s approach to selecting drivers – particularly the question of who to place alongside its star talent Max Verstappen?
Most teams appear to seek out the best pair available to them. Ferrari, for example, already had a strong driver line-up in 2023 but that didn’t stop them elbowing Carlos Sainz Jnr aside the instant seven-times world champion Lewis Hamilton became available.
There are arguably only two teams whose policy is not to run the two most competitive entries available. One is obviously Aston Martin, where Lance Stroll seemingly has a seat for as long as he likes while his father owns the operation.
Then there is Red Bull. You can’t fault their commitment to bringing new drivers into F1: they bought a second team for precisely that purpose, something none of their rivals have done. This policy has yielded terrific talents in the shape of Sebastian Vettel and, now, Verstappen.
Vettel spent much of his career alongside Mark Webber, then high-tailed it to Ferrari after one win-less season alongside the impressive Daniel Ricciardo. But the rise of Verstappen prompted Ricciardo to move on and since then Red Bull have been unable to fill the second seat with a sufficiently competitive member of their junior team.
Pierre Gasly and Alexander Albon came and went; now in the space of 12 months they’ve got through Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda. The only driver who held the seat for an appreciable length of time was Sergio Perez. His four-year stint was by far the longest of Verstappen’s team mates, but he was not a product of Red Bull’s junior programme.
Even so, for much of last season it seemed unfathomable that Red Bull had stuck with him for so long. The yawning gap between Perez and Verstappen in qualifying meant the lead Red Bull driver scored the vast majority of the team’s points. But in 2025 Red Bull achieved little by replacing him with first Lawson, then Tsunoda.
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Over the second half of last year, Perez was habitually three tenths of a second or more behind Verstappen in qualifying, often more but very rarely less (such as at Monza or Baku). Tsunoda’s one-lap pace was little different. He began the season quite a bit further off, but so did Lawson, before being dumped after just two appearances at tracks he had never visited before.
Comparing the two Red Bull drivers directly is tricky as for much of the season their cars were in quite different specifications. This wasn’t entirely by design: Tsunoda made life harder for himself with a high-speed crash at Imola as the resulting damage meant he had to run older parts for longer.
It’s also true that the scale of the lap time gap Verstappen had over his team mate hurt Tsunoda more in 2025. The field was often so close at the end of the season that the few tenths of a second between them translated into Verstappen fighting for the front row while Tsunoda dropped out in Q1. It was a similar case at other teams elsewhere later in the season, notably between the Ferrari drivers.
Like Perez, Tsunoda also had to run his race weekends in a way which best helped his team mate. Often his failure to progress beyond the first two rounds of qualifying limited his usefulness, but there were occasions where he could play the team game, notably in Mexico and Abu Dhabi.
For all that, Tsunoda’s raw numbers at the end of what may be his final season in Formula 1 look appalling when taken in isolation. His haul of just 30 points to Verstappen’s 385 in their 22 rounds together translates to the largest ever points gap between a pair of team mates by a long way.
How much better would he have performed had he made an earlier start in the RB21 and participated in pre-season testing? Would Lawson have been much further behind if Red Bull had kept him in the car? Red Bull clearly retain some faith in him as it is not he but Tsunoda who is without a drive for the 2026 F1 season.
There was nothing about Tsunoda’s season which indicated either he or Lawson were the best choice of replacement for Perez. But Red Bull’s unfathomable driver swap compromised both so badly it would be fair on either to write them off on the strength of 2025 alone. Future generations wondering what to make of Tsunoda’s awful season alongside Verstappen would be best advised to ignore it.
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| AUS | CHI | JAP | BAH | SAU | MIA | EMI | MON | SPA | CAN | AUT | GBR | BEL | HUN | NED | ITA | AZE | SIN | USA | MEX | BRZ | LAS | QAT | ABU | ||
| Verstappen | Q |  | |  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| R | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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Unrepresentative comparisons omitted. Negative value: Verstappen was faster; Positive value: Tsunoda was faster
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