Yuki Tsunoda confirms the RB21's instability after its passage in the simulator

Making his debut with a new team at his home Grand Prix: the calendar gods have been generous with Yuki tsunoda, who is about to embark on what is sure to be one of the most important weekends of his career. The Japanese player has finally secured promotion to Red Bull which he had been running after since his arrival in F1 a little over four years ago.

The former teammate of Pierre Gasly is preparing to make his debut at the most demanding team on the grid, where mistakes are not tolerated and management's patience is rapidly eroding. To succeed, Yuki Tsunoda will have to tame a Red Bull team known for its capriciousness, from which his predecessors struggled to extract the full performance.

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Sergio Pérez paid for it with his seat after an anonymous final year, but his replacement Liam Lawson did even worse over the two weekends he had at the start of the season. Yuki Tsunoda, for his part, seems confident about his chances of performing at the wheel of an RB21, whose characteristics he was able to begin to get to grips with during a stint on his new team's simulator at the Milton Keynes factory (Great Britain).

“I tested the RB21 on the simulator. Obviously, it’s never totally representative in terms of the real-life difficulty of the car, but at least I didn’t get the impression that it was extremely difficult to drive. At the same time, I was able to feel what the drivers were talking about, like instability or lack of confidence behind the wheel, nuances the Japanese pilot. I've tried different settings. I still have some others I want to test to improve everything a little. These two days have been quite productive, and at least now I know which direction I want to go in.

“I have a little bit of an idea from the simulator, but it’s always a little bit different between the simulator and the real car. So, I’ll see after if I need to adjust anything, but I don’t think I need to change my driving style, because so far it’s been working pretty well with the car, I guess. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t be here wearing this logo. I’m just going to keep doing what I was doing before and progress step by step to build my pace and everything else. Maybe I won’t even need that, maybe the car will perform immediately. And in the last few years, Red Bull has had really good performances, whether it was last year or the season before with both cars. So, I’m really looking forward to it.”

Tsunoda finds the RB21 more stable than the RB20

Although he waited four years for his chance, Yuki Tsunoda finally got the chance to drive a Red Bull during post-season testing following the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the final round of 2024. The Kanagawa native impressed Red Bull management at the wheel of an RB20, which he claims is more difficult to handle than what he saw of the RB21.

“If you push the car to more than 95 percent of its capacity, you start to feel a little bit of slip at the rear. The first sign of slip appears as soon as you start to turn in, whether it's the front or the rear, and that's when you feel the limit. In the Abu Dhabi test, fortunately, there were a lot of run-off areas, so I was able to attack immediately knowing that even if I pushed too much, there was a little bit of room to correct.” notes Yuki Tsunoda.

"That's why I was able to attack from the start and, at that point, the car felt pretty decent. Historically, the team has often had to deal with significant instability. It was very visible: as soon as I turned the steering wheel, this characteristic manifested itself immediately. So, even without really pushing, I could already feel these limits. The main point is that I didn't have a reference driver (Isack Hadjar was in the other Red Bull, editor's note) to know if I was driving fast enough to really exaggerate these limitations. But with the RB20, things were quite clear: it already had a clearly defined limit that was easy to perceive."

Driven by a slightly crazy dream of a first podium in Formula 1 this weekend at Suzuka, Yuki Tsunoda will have to put into practice the first lessons he was able to learn from the simulator from the first free practice sessions scheduled for Friday at 4:30 a.m. and then 8 a.m., French time.