Tsunoda-Lawson clash leaves Red Bull unimpressed — and the timing couldn’t be worse
Red Bull’s talent pipeline did itself no favors at Monza. Yuki Tsunoda and Liam Lawson banged wheels into the Roggia chicane, both ran wide, and the consequences for Tsunoda’s Sunday — and potentially his 2026 prospects — were immediate.
The flashpoint arrived mid-race as Tsunoda, running the senior team’s RB21, completed a move on Lawson’s Racing Bulls. Lawson countered, the New Zealander’s front-left kissed Tsunoda’s right-rear, and both cars skipped across the run-off. They continued, but Tsunoda carried floor damage from that point on. From a tidy P9 on the grid, the 25-year-old limped to 13th, Lawson 14th. Points left on the table; patience left thin on the Red Bull pit wall.
Helmut Marko didn’t sugarcoat it. “Unnecessary,” he said of the contact straight after the race. On German TV later, he went harder: “The collision with Lawson from our own team was incredibly stupid. It seems to have damaged the car severely.”
That sting lands because the stakes are plain. Tsunoda, promoted from Racing Bulls to Red Bull ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix, is fighting to turn audition into tenure. Since the step up he’s banked just nine points in 14 starts and made Q3 six times — Monza among them — but the raw numbers haven’t quieted the debate about who should partner Max Verstappen next season.
The irony is that Tsunoda’s Saturday pointed in the right direction. Team principal Laurent Mekies framed the weekend by the metrics that matter in the Red Bull camp: “Qualifying pace, race pace — that’s what we look at. It’s as simple as that.” On quali, he was bullish. “He was two tenths from Max in Q1. Two tenths in Q2. Everyone’s pushing 100% there. The gap grew in Q3, but he got the car into Q3 and he was first on the road — that didn’t help. Short-run pace was a good sample. Long-run pace is frustrating because we didn’t get a clean race.”
So this was a classic Tsunoda weekend in microcosm: evidence of speed over one lap, speed ruined by messy circumstance on Sunday. The contact with Lawson won’t read as “circumstance” inside Red Bull. Racing with a fellow Red Bull-contracted driver comes with an unwritten rule: leave margin. At Monza, the margin vanished.
Complicating all this is the calendar. Red Bull intended to lock in Verstappen’s 2026 teammate around the summer break. That decision has drifted. Marko says the team has extended its options and now wants a few more races — think September into October — before picking its direction. Translation: keep the pressure on, extend the sample size, and see who blinks.
Lawson’s part in all this shouldn’t be overlooked. He’s fighting uphill in a Racing Bulls car, but he’s in the frame for that same seat. Trading paint with the flagship car won’t help his internal stock either, even if his intent was to seize a rare chance to beat the parent team on merit. The audition is as much about judgement as it is about lap time.
Where does this leave Tsunoda? Still in the game, still short on clean Sundays. The markers are clear: convert solid qualifying into routine points, keep the elbows tucked when the opponent is wearing the same logo, and make the choice difficult — for the right reasons. The next handful of races now carry weight. Red Bull wants boring, repeatable execution. Monza was anything but.
