Yuki Tsunoda has finally put his finger on what he believes went wrong during his bruising spell last year with Red Bull Racing – and the answer was staring back at him from the other side of the garage.
Promoted to the senior team from the third round of the 2025 season, the Japanese driver arrived at Milton Keynes with a golden opportunity to establish himself at the top of the Red Bull hierarchy.
Instead, he spent much of the year struggling to extract performance from a car that Max Verstappen was still capable of driving to the front.
Tsunoda now admits that, for the first time in his career, he allowed himself to question his own driving style and tried to mould his approach around the four-time world champion.
Looking back, he believes that was precisely where he went wrong.
“One thing about myself I think, if I say [being] completely honest, I have a big enough ego to not change my driving style,” Tsunoda said, speaking on the latest episode of the Beyond the Grid podcast.
“I know what I’m doing in terms of driving. I believe in myself, so I never try to change my driving style to other drivers, even though the driver is competitive and fast.”
That philosophy had served him reasonably well during his years with Racing Bulls and its predecessor teams. But arriving alongside Verstappen presented an entirely different challenge.
The Verstappen trap
There was little doubt that Tsunoda could learn from Verstappen. The Dutchman had already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to extract performance from Red Bull machinery, including during a 2025 campaign in which he carried the team to second in the constructors’ championship.
For Tsunoda, however, admiration gradually turned into imitation.
“Obviously Max, it’s a different case, he’s a World Champion, he proves a lot of things and I still learn a lot of things from his driving,” he said.
“[It was] probably the first year out of any years since I started that I thought about changing driving style and tried to do something similar to Max.”
The irony is that Tsunoda’s own data did not necessarily tell him he needed such a dramatic transformation.
“But in my perspective, if I just look at data, I didn’t really see a huge difference in terms of driving. What I think now is the biggest mistake in last year was to try to replicate the set-up what he’s doing,” he added.
That hindsight comes after a season in which the gulf between the two Red Bull drivers became increasingly difficult to ignore.
Tsunoda scored just seven times in 21 Grands Prix for Red Bull, while Verstappen finished runner-up in the championship and won five of the final eight races. Over that same closing stretch, Tsunoda managed finishes of sixth, seventh and 10th.
By the end of the year, the experiment was over. Isack Hadjar was promoted from Racing Bulls and Tsunoda was moved into Red Bull’s reserve role.
Yet Tsunoda says the verdict hurt less than he might have expected.
“When I got told, I still remember, I didn’t feel that much of huge disappointment or devastated feeling. Obviously, still disappointed and pretty sad that I’m not driving next year. But not as I expected, I don’t know why,” he recalled.
Perhaps part of that came from knowing exactly how much he had invested in the attempt.
“I fought really hard,” he said. “I fought more than ever in that 2025 year, more than ever. And even if I look back now, I don’t have much regret. I gave everything and the outcome is something I didn’t like, obviously, but honestly, I just gave everything.”
A second chance that feels different
Tsunoda’s unexpected return to the Racing Bulls cockpit this season has provided an intriguing postscript to the Red Bull episode.
With Isack Hadjar sidelined by injury, Tsunoda was handed three races in a 2026 car that bears little resemblance to the machine he struggled with last year.
Rather than carrying the baggage of his Red Bull disappointment into the opportunity, he appears to have rediscovered something that was conspicuously absent during his senior-team spell: freedom.
The clearest example came at Zandvoort, where he was thrown straight into a Sprint weekend with just one practice session to familiarise himself with a completely new generation of machinery.
“Going back to this Netherlands story, jumping into the car that I’ve never driven, Sprint Qualifying format, team is doing really well, you know, running P5 in Championship, [knowing] that you can’t really mess up for the race, you want to have points,” he explained.
“Somehow, I was like really, [feeling] okay. I didn’t feel anything, that much, of pressure.”
Tsunoda finished 11th in the Netherlands before going one better at Monza, scoring a point with 10th place and contributing to Racing Bulls’ battle with Alpine.
But the result meant considerably more to him than a solitary championship point.
“The feeling I had, crossing the line, finishing P10, is definitely a bit more special P10 than certainly last three years of my career. Felt like really similar feeling towards first time I scored points in AlphaTauri [in my] first year.”
“I felt very valuable, [more] than usual. I was so happy, team are happy, and the kind of moments that you can celebrate with the team – that we had a good race weekend – is something I didn’t have for a while. It was a very nice moment.”
That may be the most revealing part of Tsunoda’s recent comeback. The driver who spent 2025 trying to decipher Verstappen’s methods now sounds considerably more comfortable simply being himself.
Whether that is enough to convince Red Bull or another team to give him a full-time seat remains another matter.
For now, Tsunoda has made his priorities perfectly clear.
“My primary focus is F1. I’m trying to be back. That’s my target and I’m not thinking anything else. For myself, it’s fortunate that I got opportunities so I try and maximise it and hope I can be back in 2027,” he said.
His Red Bull chapter may have ended with a demotion. But if Tsunoda is right about what went wrong, it may also have taught him the rather expensive lesson that trying to become Max Verstappen is probably not the best way to succeed in Formula 1.
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