Yuki Tsunoda Impresses with His New Red Bull Race Car
Yuki Tsunoda praised his recently updated Red Bull single-seater after delivering his best qualifying performance since joining the team.
Tsunoda qualified seventh in Belgium on Saturday, despite being outside the top ten in both sprint qualifying and the sprint race.
Before the classification for the main Grand Prix, Red Bull installed an updated floor on the Japanese driver’s car, something that was not planned for the weekend.
Tsunoda has struggled to get close to his teammate, Max Verstappen, since replacing Liam Lawson in the first three races of the season, but felt a big step forward with the updated car.
“I’m happy with that,” Tsunoda said about his performance. “Also, the team did a good job of bringing me the updates just before qualifying. That was enough to be in this position. Certainly, I feel much better.”
Yuki Tsunoda
Tsunoda arrived at the weekend expecting to be behind Verstappen in terms of the development specification of either car.
Verstappen, who raced with a complete Red Bull upgrade, won Saturday’s sprint race and will start Sunday’s race from fourth position.
Tsunoda’s best performance will be encouraging for the new Red Bull boss, Laurent Mekies, who replaced Christian Horner two weeks ago.
Mekies worked alongside him throughout last year and in the first two races of 2025 as team principal of Racing Bulls.
“We updated his car just before qualifying, as we are always pushing the limit on the amount of parts on our car,” Mekies told F1 TV on Saturday. “But we decided to take the risk of updating his car, which is why you may have seen that we were almost a bit late for qualifying.”
With the new part, Tsunoda felt vindicated about the recent feedback he has been giving.
When asked what the new floor gave him in the car, he said: “A little more grip! Literally. We already saw on paper how much difference we had [with Verstappen], I don’t know how many races we had. But considering the difference I had in terms of lap time delta that I have between Max and me, it wasn’t that big.”
“I already knew in myself and in the engineering group that we are on the right track for me to improve the way we want. I am glad to have shown it.”
“Generally a little more grip… just the grip was what was a little more sensitive with anything [before]. It never followed [my inputs]. This one handled like… you can be aggressive with it.”
Tsunoda has only finished in the points twice in Sunday races since he moved up to Red Bull, finishing tenth in Miami and Imola.
Since then, he has finished 17th, 13th, 12th, 16th and 15th.
I had finished Saturday’s sprint race in 11th place.
