Tsunoda expects his driving style will work at Red Bull “otherwise I wouldn’t be here” · RaceFans

Yuki Tsunoda is confident he will be able to cope with the unusual handling characteristics of Red Bull’s car following his sudden promotion to the team after the last race.

Red Bull moved Tsunoda into the team in place of Liam Lawson, who struggled in his first two appearances for them in Melbourne and Shanghai. He replaced Sergio Perez, who was dropped by the team at the end of last year, as he had fallen far behind the pace of team mate Max Verstappen.

Tsunoda said he is “really looking forward” to his debut for the team, which coincides with his home round of the championship at Suzuka.

“It can’t be crazier than this situation,” said Tsunoda. “First race in Red Bull Racing, but also on top of it in the home grand prix. I think it’s the best situation ever.”

He has only driven the team’s RB21 in the simulator so far. Lawson, who has returned to Tsunoda’s former seat at Racing Bulls, found it difficult to adapt to the car, but Tsunoda is confident he will be able to adjust to it.

“First of all, I didn’t feel yet the exact trickiness what the driver is saying,” he said. “I have a bit of an idea from the simulator, but it’s always a bit different from the simulator to the real car.

“So I’ll see after [first practice] if I have to change set-up, but I don’t think I have to change my driving style because in the end, so far it works well, I guess, with [Racing Bulls], otherwise probably I wouldn’t be here wearing this logo.

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“So I’ll just do whatever I was doing previously and I’ll go step-by-step to build the pace and everything. But let’s see, maybe I don’t have to do that, maybe the car is good straight away. In the last years I think Red Bull had pretty good performance last season, both cars, so I’m quite looking forward it.”

Tsunoda began the season in his fifth year at Red Bull’s junior team. He had his first test for Red Bull at the end of last year at the Yas Marina circuit in Abu Dhabi, which he said gave him useful insight into the peculiarities of their car’s handling.

“If you’re able to push with that car straight away, with more than I guess above 95 [percent] just for the reference, you start to feel a bit of sliding front and rear first thing,” he explained. “You feel sliding once you start turning in, at the front and rear you see the limitation.”

He felt able to push the car and get a feel for its limitations. “In the Abu Dhabi test, fortunately there are a lot of run-off areas, so I was able to push immediately, knowing that even I push and if I go too much I know that there’s a bit of space to be forgiven. That’s why I was able to push it immediately.

“At the same time, at that point, I felt quite okay with the car. The RB20 had a historically big limitation with instability and I think it was quite clear, visible, that as soon as I turned in, it was always happening with that kind of characteristic. So probably even [though] I was not pushing enough, I already felt those things.

“The main thing is I didn’t have any reference driver to know actually am I driving fast enough or not, to exaggerate that kind of limitation. But I think RB20 was quite easy and having already quite big limitation enough to feel that I had instability quite a lot initially turning in.”

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Driving Red Bull’s current car in the simulator reinforced Tsunoda’s impression of the car’s behaviour at the limit of grip.

“I just felt it in the car in the simulator – obviously I’m sure it’s not fully correlated in terms of the trickiness of the car – but at least didn’t feel like crazy, crazy tricky.

“At the same time I can feel what the drivers was mentioning about the instability or driver confidence things. I tried different set-ups that I wanted to try to make it a little bit better and actually those two days were pretty productive.

“At least I know now what kind of direction I want to start and it seems to be a good baseline also [for] overall performance so I think it was a really, really good simulator session.”