Tsunoda's challenge: master a car built for Verstappen

Out of all the drivers who have tried and failed to fulfil their promise at Red Bull, Alex Albon put it best in a non-F1 spiel in explaining the seismic challenge one faces with a car engineered to the demands of the team’s leading driver, Max Verstappen.

- KIERAN JACKSON

Now forming one half of Williams’s impressive driver line-up alongside Carlos Sainz after a difficult 18-month spell at Red Bull in 2019-20, Albon told The High Performace Podcast in 2023: “I would say my driving style is a bit more on the smooth side, but I like a car that has a good front-end, so quite sharp, quite direct.

“Max does too, but his level of sharp and direct is a whole different level – it’s eye-wateringly sharp. To give people kind of maybe an explanation of what that might feel like: if you bump up the sensitivity [on a computer game] completely to the max, and you move that mouse, and it’s just darting across the screen everywhere, that’s kind of how it feels. It becomes so sharp that it makes you a little bit tense.”

That sensitivity and haphazardness show the scale of the task ahead for Yuki Tsunoda, ahead of his Red Bull debut this weekend at his home race in Japan. Tsunoda received the call-up after a torrid first two races for Liam Lawson in Australia and China, which included a crash and two back-of-the-pack qualifying results.

Would Red Bull stay patient – or chop and change? The last decade has shown us that the axe Christian Horner and Helmut Marko wielded was no surprise, even after two races.