Max Verstappen’s early retirement from the Austrian Grand Prix put the focus on Yuki Tsunoda’s poor form in the second Red Bull. With Max out, the rest of the Red Bull team’s sole focus was the car struggling at the opposite end of the grid. Winding up last at the end of a combative 70 laps, it was another day to forget for the Japanese racer.
The stark reality for Red Bull is that without Verstappen’s considerable haul of points, they would be last in the Teams’ championship.
After Liam Lawson’s disappointing two-race stint for the senior team, things looked temporarily better for Tsunoda at Red Bull, but he is now slumping back to a form worse than Sergio Perez and no better than Lawson’s couple of races. The truth is, without Verstappen, Red Bull aren’t even midfielders, they are tail-enders in Formula 1 and even a long way adrift of Racing Bulls.
It’s been well documented that the car is hard to drive, but you sensed the frustration from Christian Horner in his post Grand Prix comments – “it isn’t an easy car to drive, but it’s not that difficult either”.
It must have been a tough reality check for the pit wall who didn’t have their star driver in play, and who seems the only man capable of driving Red Bull’s cars over the last seven years.
So why is the Dutchman the only driver seemingly able to extract decent pace from the Red Bull?
Max has a very specific style and an incredible feel for the car. He likes a positive front end and a car that can be sharp on entry. He can also deal with the usual compromise of oversteer better than anyone in the field. The problem then seems to be finding someone else who can handle similar characteristics to Verstappen.
In the first races of 2025, it was clear that Lawson couldn’t drive the car consistently near the limit even around a single lap. He could do an occasional quick corner, but would then lose a heap by making a mistake at the next.
Trying to drive this car on the limit for an entire lap isn’t easy, unless you make changes to settle it down. But if you settle it down and find a more drivable balance, you take away the natural strength of the design philosophy and pick up too much understeer, which makes you plain slow. This seems to be where Tsunoda is at now.
Looking at Yuki’s Qualifying laps recently, there aren’t any obvious errors in there. He’s not hanging on to the car, or losing chunks of time in any particular corner.
If anything, as a driver it’s nicer to come back from a disappointing session and see that a mistake here or there cost you, because it’s something tangible. You can put your finger on it, see what you did wrong and work out how much it cost. You can also figure out changes to your driving style to correct it.
In Yuki’s case at the moment, there aren’t any obvious errors to point at, which is why both he and the team are left bamboozled at his lack of pace. His crash at the start of Imola Qualifying (see the clip below) looked like a case of a driver trying to reset heading into a crucial session after a difficult run of practices. He’d looked through the data and was determined to attack from the first lap.
Unfortunately in attacking he tried to do the impossible, lumped over the kerbs at high speed and was pitched into his dramatic crash. The car is so difficult to drive that in desperation for performance, it’s easy to over-drive and crash. But the alternative is then what happened in Barcelona and Austria – to under-drive, or have the car be too sedate and be slow.
Tsunoda has said he’ll delve into the data with his engineers and try to understand what is going on, but history says it’s not going to be easy to fix. After all, this is an issue that has impacted multiple drivers in multiple Red Bull cars over multiple sets of regulations.
When asked if he was confident about his chances at Red Bull, Yuki was bullish at the start of the season, but now nine races into his tenure in the sport’s toughest seat, I think the understanding of the fates of many before him has hit.
He hoped that because his driving style was closer to that of Max he would be better off, but it turns out that nobody can drive a car similar to how Max can operate at his peak.
I’ve never known one driver to drive so differently to so many others, but it is the only explanation and it is a complete head scratcher for Red Bull – and anyone else who might want to hire the most formidable talent in the field.
It is that same incredible natural style and feel that makes Max the talent he is, but in developing a car in a way that optimises their star driver, will that make any team with Max in it naturally a one-car team?
And what about Red Bull? Logic would say they should focus their development on making the car more drivable for the ‘average’ F1 driver, rather than their superstar, but is that just shackling their greatest asset?
Yuki finds himself in a tough spot. The only thing he can do is dust himself off and go again, trying another reset at Silverstone this weekend. Unlike Lawson, he has the benefit of a few years’ worth of CV to fall back on, so we know what he is capable of in the right machinery.
The question is, can he extract anything more out of the second half of the season in Red Bull colours and finally find a flow, or will he end up heading the way of his increasingly long line of predecessors – Alex Albon, Pierre Gasly and so on – and perhaps needing to rebuild a life outside of Red Bull at the end of the year.
