Yuki Tsunoda admits he still doesn’t understand why Red Bull went so wrong
Yuki Tsunoda says F1 2025 was his toughest year ever.
Reflecting on his time with Red Bull, Yuki Tsunoda says he still cannot explain what went wrong as he struggled to adapt to the RB21 and lost confidence as the season progressed.
Tsunoda entered last year’s campaign prepared for a fifth season with Red Bull’s junior team, Racing Bulls, only to be promoted to Red Bull after two races.
Yuki Tsunoda reflects on his difficult Red Bull season
The Japanese driver swapped seats with Liam Lawson, who returned to Racing Bulls, but he too failed to make a notable impact.
Tsunoda scored 30 points in 22 race weekends as a Red Bull driver, and finished the season 388 points behind his teammate Max Verstappen. The four-time world champion claimed eight Grand Prix victories, while Tsunoda didn’t even reach the podium.
Tsunoda says he still doesn’t understand why it went so wrong.
“Normally I’m able to understand the car, what I’m driving, what kind of characteristic,” he said on the Beyond the Grid podcast.
“But it feels like even after Abu Dhabi, I didn’t know what kind of car I was driving.
“I still don’t understand what was the issue and what things made me struggle to learn about this car and get used to the car.
“I thought confidence was there, but some [races] I just somehow lost the confidence. I still don’t understand the car, to be honest.”
As his struggles continued, Tsunoda even considered adopting Max Verstappen’s driving style to try to pull himself out of his rut.
The data, though, showed there wasn’t much difference between how the teammates were driving the RB22.
“One thing about myself, I have big enough ego to not change my driving style,” he explained.
“I know what I’m doing in terms of driving and I believe in myself. So, I never try to change my driving style to another driver’s, even though the driver is competitive and fast.
“Obviously for 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.
“My core driving is the same. And at some time, probably the first year out of any years since I started, I thought about changing driving style and trying to do something similar to Max.
“But in my perspective, if I just look at data, I didn’t really see a huge difference in terms of driving.”
Exhausted by the situation, the Japanese driver revealed he struggled to recover during his time away from the track.
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As the weeks went by, he not only wasn’t enjoying racing, he says he wasn’t enjoying life.
“Definitely, 2025 was the toughest year in my career, and I learned heaps of things,” he said.
“I’m the kind of person, as soon as I had good food or whatever, I was able to reset myself between the race weeks.
“But I started to really struggle, towards the second half of the season especially. Somehow when I came back to my house, I felt very exhausted.
“Normally I’m able to reset myself, get back this energy after I had something that I really like, if I do something that I really like. But I didn’t feel that energy never came back, and the races just kept going and going, going, going.
“I had so much up and down, and at some point I just recognised myself that I’m not really enjoying my life, I would say, like I’m not really enjoying the situation, not really enjoying driving Formula 1 probably as much as I was doing the first three years.
“So, it was a very tough time, and outside of racing, try to solve this issue, right? What can I do to help that?
“And if I look back, is there something else other than eating food or this stuff? What makes me happy? And normally it’s friends, but mostly friends in Japan and…
“I really recognised, actually I’m away from Japan. That I really never thought about since probably my first year in F3.
“Okay, this is tough, something that I have to resolve myself.
“I got help quite a lot with psychology, trainer and a lot of things, but the race [schedule] was pretty busy in the second half, so it was a pretty tough time. But at the same time, the year gave me the opportunity to look myself through a lot more than any other years.”
Asked if anything in his racing career would ever be as hard as last year, Tsunoda replied: “I don’t think so.”
Dropped from the race seat at Red Bull after scoring just 30 points across 22 Grands Prix, Tsunoda continued with Red Bull and Racing Bulls as the teams’ official reserve driver for the F1 2026 season.
He has filled in for Liam Lawson at Racing Bulls for three races after the New Zealander was called on by Red Bull to substitute for Isack Hadjar, who had fractured his wrist in a training accident.
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