Yuki Tsunoda says he needs to excel in the final two races of the 2024 Formula 1 season to “force” Red Bull to consider him for a race seat – and that a simulator test has indicated he can be quick in the team’s car.
Tsunoda is one of several drivers in the mix to replace the embattled Sergio Perez, who currently sits eighth in the drivers’ standings when his team-mate won the world championship last weekend.
Perez’s comparatively meagre points haul – 152 to Max Verstappen’s 403 – has enabled both McLaren and Ferrari to overhaul Red Bull in the constructors’ standings, which could cost the team tens of millions of dollars in prize revenue.
Tsunoda is one of several candidates to replace him and, ahead of a recently confirmed opportunity to drive Red Bull’s 2024 car in the post-season Abu Dhabi test, he has had a run in the team’s simulator.
“I drove different tracks just to get used to how the Red Bull car looks,” he said. “It’s a pretty fast car.
“In the simulator at least, it just feels different [to the RB] and just great to drive, like the amount of speed you can carry into the corner. And it’s quite sharp turning compared with our car.
“But it just feels great. Normally, simulator work is more like work, right? But when I was driving [the Red Bull], I feel I... there was a bit of an enjoyable feeling when I was driving.
“So I think, at least for so far, from what I experienced in the simulator, it’s a car that will suit me. I think actually that car suits me well. So, yeah, it’s pretty good.”
Since getting his break with Red Bull’s sister team in 2021, Tsunoda has been consistently overlooked for promotion to the seat alongside Verstappen. He has frequently voiced frustration at this, despite – in his words – “destroying” more than one team-mate.
The most recent RB driver to be dropped after failing to outperform Tsunoda was Daniel Ricciardo, a grand prix winner. And yet Ricciardo’s replacement, Liam Lawson, is known to be just as strong a candidate as Tsunoda if Perez were to be cast out – and Red Bull bosses are understood to be looking outside the organisation’s young driver pool, too.
Tsunoda is under no illusions about what the post-season test represents, even though he has fought for it for so long.
“Throughout the year so far, how they see me from the Red Bull [perspective], I feel like the test is just a test,” he said. “The next two races are definitely more important.
“Hopefully, the test will maybe add a bit more, I guess, a better impression, or better picture, exactly how I am as a driver. But I think the next two races are definitely more important to be in that mix, in the talking about those seats.
“I don’t know what should I do more than this, to be honest, [to impress them]. But I’ll just keep pushing and these things I can control. And those things, the Red Bull seat, they decide it.”
Tsunoda’s RB team is one of three battling over sixth place in the constructors’ championship and the Japanese driver has scored all but two of its 46 points this season.
While the final placings have a substantial effect on team revenues, the outfits which generally race for the scraps behind the top four teams are tightly grouped.
Fifth-placed Aston Martin is something of an outlier on 86 points, largely through the efforts of Fernando Alonso. In the battle for sixth, Haas and RB have collected minor points placings consistently but in small enough numbers for unusual race conditions to have a significant effect – Alpine is now part of this group chiefly through scoring an unexpected double podium in the chaos of Brazil.
Tsunoda believes that in this context his speed, rather than RB’s final place in the standings, should be a deciding factor. He is also well aware that behind-the-scenes politics in the wider Red Bull organisation is contributing to the uncertainty over who may replace Perez if it were to happen at all.
“If they say, OK, P6 is the task that you have to [achieve] to be in Red Bull seat – it’s a pretty difficult thing to say, because the team championship is combined between team drivers, not just individual drivers,” he said. “But I’ll do as much as can and hopefully, if I can score P6 [for RB], that will give a better reason to put me in a Red Bull seat.
“Maybe they’re facing difficult things, different things that probably I don’t know, in the background. So yeah, I’m just going to force them with my results or my performance so that [they say], ‘Oh, maybe we really need Yuki to be in our seat, otherwise things won’t change.’
“So, yeah, I’ve just got to force them with my performance.”
