Max Verstappen, Red Bull, Yas Marina, 2025

Max Verstappen gave a largely positive verdict on Red Bull’s performance at the end of the first day of running at Yas Marina.

However Yuki Tsunoda, starting his final weekend as Verstappen’s team mate, was again mystified by his lack of pace during Friday’s running.

Verstappen ended the day second-quickest behind Lando Norris but Tsunoda was almost eight tenths of a second off his team mate in 17th place.

The reigning world champion said the first day of running was “pretty okay – I was fairly happy with the car.”

“We just need to be a little bit faster,” he told the official Formula 1 channel. “We’re still not quick enough, but I think overall we have been in, for us, a decent window around here.”

At one stage during second practice Verstappen caught a sudden snap of oversteer in the high-speed turn three, where the track has been resurfaced since last season. He said the ride problem he experienced “is a constant fight that we have, but that’s nothing new.”

Norris led both practice sessions and ended the day three-tenths of a second quicker than Verstappen. “It seems like it’s a decent gap that we need to close,” the Red Bull driver admitted. “But from our side we’ll just try to put the best car forward and see how much we can find overnight.”

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“The single lap and long run needs to be better,” he added.

However Tsunoda, who sat out the first practice session so the team could run junior driver Arvid Lindblad in order to fulfil a requirement under F1’s rules, was much less happy with his evening’s run.

“I didn’t expect it to be this challenging, to be honest,” he said. “It’s too far away.

“I don’t know what’s going on, to be honest. I have to see why, what’s going on. The gap seems one of the worst of the season.”

Tsunoda said he “didn’t feel [very] comfortable, [to] be honest, in the car.”

“I kept sliding around. I have to find out why, what was causing this issue. It’s not really good.”

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