Yuki Tsunoda: Red Bull’s new F1 driver begins quest to show seat not poisoned chalice at home Japanese GP | F1 Newsnews24

So now it is Yuki Tsunoda’s turn to step into what his new boss has regularly admitted is the “hardest seat in Formula 1” – being team-mate to Max Verstappen.

After Liam Lawson’s troubled but extraordinarily brief two-race stay in the second Red Bull seat at the start of the new season, Tsunoda takes it over from round three this weekend for what, coincidently or not, happens to be his home Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka.

For Tsunoda, the promotion is a chance to finally prove what he has been telling everyone for some time – that he is ready to fight at the front of F1.

For Red Bull, for all the shock and criticism that has accompanied their brutal driver switch so soon into the campaign, the Suzuka weekend will give them a first chance to start to find out whether they have made the right call on Sergio Perez’s in-house replacement at the second attempt.

Why Tsunoda feels his chance is overdue

It was in July last year, as fresh rumours began to swirl around Perez’s future amid a fresh downturn in the Mexican’s form, that Tsunoda first started to truly voice public frustration at what he felt was his lack of just opportunity to move up the Red Bull ladder.

At the time the Japanese driver was midway through his fourth season at the junior squad and had clearly become a more rounded and consistent performer compared with his early days at the team, with a penchant for wild on-track incidents, mistakes and radio outbursts having reduced in their frequency.

After steadily improving alongside the more experienced Pierre Gasly after initially being dominated by the Frenchman in his 2021 debut year, Tsunoda had seen off the new challenge of Dutchman Nyck de Vries in the space of 10 races at the start of 2023 and was now regularly outperforming eight-time race winner Daniel Ricciardo.

Ricciardo had been brought back into the Red Bull fold the previous year after being dropped by McLaren as an effective insurance policy should the senior team need an experienced replacement for an increasingly inconsistent Perez. But Tsunoda was regularly outqualifying and outscoring him.

“Obviously, I’m feeling ready, compared to the last three years, to fight against top teams, higher positions, even with Max or whatever,” said Tsunoda at last year’s Hungarian GP. “But in the end, they are the ones who are going to decide and it’s not a thing I can control. So I’m just focusing on what I have to do.”

He also described the notion that at that point Red Bull could instead choose to promote inexperienced Lawson, who had appeared in five races alongside Tsunoda while filling in for an injured Ricciardo the season before but was currently their reserve driver, as “weird”.

Four months on in November and with Perez’s sustained lack of form making his position next to Verstappen appear increasingly untenable as the season wound down, and with Lawson now his team-mate full-time after Red Bull had called time on the Ricciardo return experiment, a frustrated Tsunoda made a firmer case for a call-up in 2025.

“I always say that I definitely deserve that seat. I can’t say more than that. It’s up to them,” he said. “Whenever they keep sending their driver to me to beat me, I just keep destroying them. So that’s what I’m going to do.”

Thanks in part to backers Honda’s powers of persuasion, Tsunoda would eventually got a chance to test the main Red Bull car for the first time in the post-season session in Abu Dhabi at the start of December, although by then it was pretty much an open secret that Perez was leaving and Lawson was getting the drive.

That’s duly how it played out days later, which seemed to leave Tsunoda’s avenue to the main team indefinitely blocked – particularly with backers Honda heading for Aston Martin at the end of 2025.

But the scale of Lawson’s struggles in the first fortnight of the new season, and the haste with which Red Bull acted in the wake of round two in China to make a switch, changed all of that.

What’s in Tsunoda’s in-tray for Suzuka?

The first thing that Tsunoda will clearly be keen to get to grips with as quickly as possible on his debut weekend is an RB21 car that no one at Red Bull, even Verstappen, seems not to be acknowledging is a challenging machine to tame at the moment.

Unlike Lawson, Tsunoda will not have the benefit of any pre-season running to build from as the first time the 24-year-old will drive the RB21 in real life will be when the light goes green for opening practice on Friday morning.

Whether debuting for the senior team at his home event proves a help or a hinderance remains to be seen although, on the positive side, Suzuka is certainly a track to which Tsunoda needs absolutely no introduction.

In his his three F1 appearances there so far alone, he has not qualified lower than 13th for Racing Bulls and finished 10th in last year’s Grand Prix for his first home point.

Needless to say, Japan’s only current F1 star will have huge home support too.

In a seemingly more compliant, if less ultimately competitive, car to the one he will now be driving, Tsunoda has also started the new campaign well at Racing Bulls having qualified in the top 10 in all three qualifying sessions so far and scored points with sixth place in the Shanghai Sprint.

Indeed his three-point haul would have almost certainly been higher but for Racing Bulls’ strategy miscues in the two Grands Prix so far.

Tsunoda will have completed a seat fit and had simulator time at Red Bull’s Milton Keynes factory last week before flying out to Japan, but it will be on the track in the three one-hour practice sessions ahead of Saturday’s qualifying in Japan when he will truly get to find out what he is working with.

Those sessions will be all be about building confidence in the car and establishing strong working practices with his new team and colleagues. Early momentum that proved so elusive to find for the unfortunate Lawson.

What kind of results will Tsunoda be expected to achieve?

While the events of the past week have underlined that time is definitely of the essence in a notoriously ruthless Red Bull driver programme, one thing the team’s management will almost certainly not be expecting from Tsunoda straight away – if at any stage – is for him to match world champion’s Verstappen’s rapid and relentless pace.

So what actually is the role of Red Bull’s second driver right now, then?

Sky Sports F1 commentator David Croft said: “Thinking long term, if Yuki gets a long term, he’s got to get to within a couple of tenths of a second in qualifying of Verstappen.

“He’s got to score consistent points and be there to take the chances when they come his way.

“Don’t think about beating Verstappen yet, although I’m sure Yuki would dearly love to do that. Max is the best driver on the grid currently – he’s not in the best car but he is the best driver on the grid.”

Verstappen’s sheer talent and the consistently-impressive performances the reigning four-time world champion is able to drag out of Red Bull’s challenging car – which see him sit second to McLaren’s Lando Norris in the early 2025 Drivers’ Championship – is why team boss Christian Horner has routinely described the seat Tsunoda is now in as the toughest gig on the grid.

“Yuki needs to play the race not the team-mate,” advises Croft of how to approach being team-mate to the Dutchman.

“In darts, say you’re up against Luke Littler, you don’t play the man, you play the board, from 501 down to a double finish as quickly as you can and forget about you are playing.

“Yuki needs to forget about who his team-mate is, just go out and do the maximum he can each and every session, in every qualifying session and every race.

“That maybe might ease the pressure that he’s now going to be put under because there is a huge pressure difference between racing for Racing Bulls – despite doing very well and being very unlucky not to score points in the first two races – and racing for Red Bull who are expectant of wins, poles and championships.”

Thursday April 3

• 5am: Drivers’ Press Conference

Friday April 4

• 3am: Japanese GP Practice One (session starts at 3.30am)
• 5.30am: Team Principals’ Press Conference
• 6.45am: Japanese GP Practice Two (session starts at 7am)
• 8.15am: The F1 Show

Saturday April 5

• 3.15am: Japanese GP Practice Three (session starts at 3.30am)
• 6am: Japanese GP Qualifying build-up
• 7am: Japanese GP Qualifying
• 9am: Ted’s Qualifying Notebook

Sunday April 6

• 4.30am: Japanese GP build-up: Grand Prix Sunday
• 6am: THE JAPANESE GRAND PRIX
• 8am: Japanese GP reaction: Chequered Flag
• 9am: Ted’s Notebook

Formula 1 heads to the iconic Suzuka Circuit for the Japanese Grand Prix on April 4-6, live on Sky Sports F1. Stream Sky Sports with NOW – No contract, cancel anytime