With his Red Bull debut on the horizon at the Japanese GP, Yuki Tsunoda recently made a bold claim that he would like to finish on the podium in Suzuka. However, given the tricky nature of the RB21 and the recent circumstances of his predecessor Liam Lawson performing abysmally with it, Tsunoda knows a podium could be a far-fetched dream.
The Japanese driver knows that this opportunity at Red Bull has come after a lot of perseverance and patience shown by him. So, he would not want to squander it away by being too bullish and failing like Lawson did. It is a sprint, not a marathon, as the saying goes!
Tsunoda needs to acclimatize himself with the RB21 and deliver on Red Bull’s expectations of being close to Max Verstappen as soon as possible. So, even if he doesn’t get a podium in Japan, the team would be happy if the 24-year-old shows potential with a decent points-scoring finish.
However, before Tsunoda aims to score points, F1 journalist Ian Parkes has stated how the #22 driver needs to focus on qualifying. Having seen Lawson bow out of Q1 thrice so far, Red Bull will be eager to get both cars into Q3 in Japan. Parkes believes that should be Tsunoda’s goal.
“That car is capable. It’s a Q3 car quite clearly. Yuki has to get into Q3. Otherwise, already question marks are going to start being asked, if he doesn’t get it into Q3 with that car,” he said on RacingNews365’s podcast.
Chances of a home race podium have never looked better for Yuki Tsunoda pic.twitter.com/QmKbiccFAn
— Motorsport.com (@Motorsport) March 31, 2025
Relative to Verstappen, Tsunoda will naturally be on the back foot. Nobody knows the Red Bull car better than the Dutchman. Still, the Japanese driver needs to work on it to understand its quirks and develop his own setup, so that he can progress further and close the gap to Verstappen’s benchmark pace race by race.
If the reigning world champion gets a podium in Japan, Tsunoda will have to perform well enough to finish in the top six at least. That should be his aim if he wants to prove to Red Bull that he is capable of being the Dutchman’s teammate. However, qualifying will be crucial for such a result, something Lawson struggled with particularly.
How is Tsunoda feeling after the initial simulator run in the RB21?
Given Suzuka is Tsunoda’s home track, Parkes feels that he should do well at the Japanese GP as he knows the track like the back of his hand. On top of that, Tsunoda also had a simulator run in the RB21 after the news of his replacing Lawson became official.
The Japanese driver revealed that he doesn’t feel that the car is tricky as such, even though he acknowledged that it does have a very sensitive front end. “From that experience, I didn’t find the car to be that challenging to drive. I definitely got the impression that the front end is very responsive, as people often say,” he said during a Honda event recently.
“But if you ask whether it felt tricky to handle, I wouldn’t say it gave me a particularly strange feeling, at least in the simulator,” he added.
If the simulator experience of the RB21 does translate to the track for Tsunoda, a top-five finish is certainly on the cards, given his top-class form of late.
