Inside Red Bull’s Tsunoda reboot: the meeting that may have saved his seat
Yuki Tsunoda has found a pulse at exactly the moment he needed one. After a bruising run since his mid-season promotion to Red Bull, the Japanese driver turned a quiet 13th in Monza into his best afternoon of the year with sixth in Baku — and, crucially, showed the kind of race pace that actually mattered.
The spark, according to Helmut Marko, came from a frank post-Monza sit-down that reset how the team works with Tsunoda. Red Bull realised they had to stop trying to make him fit the Verstappen mold and instead meet him where he is.
“We changed the approach,” Marko told Sky Germany, noting Tsunoda’s deficit to Verstappen in Italy had been too big to ignore. The message from the meeting was simple: coach him more, shape the car more to his preferences, and take the rough edges off the learning curve. Since then, the lap-time gap has shrunk and the confidence looks a touch taller.
This is all landing against a ticking clock. Tsunoda’s contract is up at the end of the season, and Red Bull is weighing its options for 2026. Isack Hadjar is impressing across the hall at Racing Bulls, and you don’t need a PhD in Red Bull politics to know what that means for anyone not named Max. Tsunoda’s best route to staying in the family is to make himself a headache in the right way: consistent points, clean weekends, and performances that force his bosses to think twice.
Baku helped. It wasn’t just P6 — it was the manner of it. Team principal Laurent Mekies, who knows Tsunoda well from their time together at Racing Bulls, called it his most complete drive of the year. Tsunoda qualified strongly, then ran to a pace that didn’t need protecting. On paper, he was supposed to play rear-gunner against the McLarens and Ferraris to buy Verstappen clear air. In reality, he didn’t need rescuing.
“He was genuinely there on merit,” Mekies said, pointing to a race pace that sat within a few tenths of Verstappen’s benchmark for long stretches. When the car’s fast, Verstappen usually makes the rest of the grid look a step behind. If your second car is close enough to that to keep the pack off its gearbox, you’re doing your job at Red Bull.
That’s been the issue so far. Tsunoda’s season hasn’t been heavy on points, and yes, the comparison to Verstappen’s haul is lopsided — but so is everyone’s. The more relevant metric is whether the number two car consistently backs up the pit wall’s strategy playbook. At Monza, it didn’t. In Baku, it did. One result won’t rewrite a season, but it can reset the narrative.
There’s also the human element. Tsunoda’s move into the top team came fast, replacing Liam Lawson two races into the campaign. He arrived with flashes of raw speed, a streak of aggression, and a reputation for being brutally honest on the radio — all very Red Bull, until you’re lining up opposite Verstappen and every weakness is in neon. The admission that he needs more coaching isn’t a slight; it’s an adult decision inside a paddock that often forgets patience. If Red Bull can turn Tsunoda into a reliable front-runner alongside Verstappen, it makes the entire operation calmer and the title maths easier.
And let’s be honest: life next to Max is a uniquely difficult job. The Dutchman’s output sets the standard and, inevitably, the narrative. If you’re one second off in race trim, that’s not a little problem — it’s Sunday afternoon in the rear-view mirror. That Monza meeting seems to have been the moment everyone aligned on the solution: tailor the car, tailor the comms, tailor the weekend to Tsunoda, then demand he deliver.
What happens next? Red Bull has a decision to make for 2026, and not much appetite for sentiment. Tsunoda’s best case is a run-in heavy on top-six finishes, clean Saturdays, and races where he’s a factor against McLaren and Ferrari, not just a rolling chess piece. Keep producing Baku-level Sundays and the conversation shifts from “who replaces him” to “is this our best pairing for the new regs.”
For now, there are green shoots. The lap times are trending the right way, the messaging is coherent, and the driver sounds like he knows exactly what’s required. Red Bull, for its part, seems prepared to give him the framework. The rest is Tsunoda’s to take — and he knows better than most that in this team, moments turn into careers fast, or not at all.
