Yuki Tsunoda is entering his third weekend as a Red Bull driver in the Saudi Arabian GP. Settling down into the top team seat has been a steady process so far. In fact, the Japanese driver scored his first points in the past Bahrain round after a pointless Suzuka.
A strong debut…
The young talent is pleased with his time so far with the Milton Keynes-based team. However, he believes that time will alow him to unlock even more performance, as he discussed with selected medias:
“In terms of confidence level, yeah, I’m quite happy with the level where I am. Because it has been two races, and I’m sure it will come more. But just more towards like, I’m just trying to understand how this car operates, how this car performs well. There are a lot of reasons to perform well, to perform in the window that this car wants, like warm up and setups and those things.
“I have not fully understood it yet. I still don’t really understand even half of it. These things are the key that I’m trying to work on really hard to understand as much as possible. So I can work on different sort of stuff, all sorts of developments and whatever.”
…but there is more to come!
Time will be king in the completion of Tsunoda ‘s adaptation process to Red Bull, and the Saudi Arabian GP can be a great starting point.
“So far, I’m able to kind of put it all together in qualifying and race. But also, at the same time, it’s quite up and down still. There’s a bit of up and down from FP1 to FP3. So I just wanted to be more consistent throughout.”
The former AlphaTauri driver admitted that right now it’s best for him to spend time in the actual car. In fact, he belives it will assist him in gaining a thorough knowledge of its tweaks. Thi is even more important especially considering how differently the car behaves at the different tracks in the F1 calendar.
“The thing is, I’m mostly debriefed and I’m also consistently chatting with others, but these things can’t also be experienced, really, and also how this car behaves quite differently in each track as well.”
“ So it’s quite hard to predict, each track has kind of different behaviour and pace. It is a new thing, which also probably Max had a similar feeling in Bahrain. So it’s just that sort of thing.”
Pace can’t be taught
While Tsunoda can learn the technical aspects which characterize the RB21, others are not as easy as to get to learn, in particular how to properly get the car to work in the best way or how to find the optimal setup. This kind of small tweaks, which will allow him to unlock much more performance, can’t be taught, but only can be discovered with experience.
“Obviously, it’s the part that no one else can explain, but the place that people and Max understood quite well and the engineers as well understood quite well, is coming from their experience, how they had in the previous Grand Prix.”
“ They can tell you the words, but I don’t understand fully how that exactly feels like in the car. So those things, I just have to take time and build it up.”
Tsunoda is getting acquainted with his Red Bull challenger and will be on the watchout during the Saudi Arabian GP for more performance and, who know, maybe even the first F1 podium of his career!
