Yuki Tsunoda didn’t blink when Red Bull called. Two races into 2025, he hopped out of a quietly promising Racing Bulls and into the RB21, tasked with narrowing the chasm to Max Verstappen and shoring up a constructors’ fight. The gamble hasn’t paid off the way anyone hoped, and now, with the season winding down, Tsunoda’s verdict is blunt: the only thing he regrets is stepping away from a “pretty good f**king car.”
That car, the VCARB02, has been the sleeper of the midfield—tidy, confidence-inspiring, and, crucially, consistent. Tsunoda helped shape it through the current ground‑effect era before Red Bull’s call-up came after round two. He was supposed to be the plug-and-play solution after Liam Lawson’s early struggles alongside Verstappen. Instead, Tsunoda ran into a wall—literally at Imola—and never quite recovered the rhythm or upgrades cadence that a Red Bull driver needs to survive.
“Probably I was saying that I didn’t have any regrets, but the only regret I have is missing out on that pretty good f**king car,” he admitted ahead of Abu Dhabi. “It’s like throwing away your kids, your baby. This is the car I developed with the team throughout the years. I’m sure there’s my DNA inside that as well.”
It’s hard not to feel the sting in that line. Tsunoda watched, from inside the flagship garage, as the Racing Bulls looked planted and punchy in a variety of conditions. The RB21, by contrast, has remained a razor’s edge that Verstappen can walk but others often can’t. When Tsunoda clattered the wall in Imola qualifying, it set off a familiar domino effect: confidence dented, development parts delayed, momentum gone. He has made steady progress understanding the car’s knottier traits, and Baku provided a clean, efficient run to the points, but the tally sheet tells a harsher story. In their separate stints, both Lawson and Isack Hadjar have outscored him this year.
Racing Bulls boss Peter Bayer offered a neat explanation earlier in the season. With this generation of aero, he said, driveability is lap time. “They are monsters where, if you make one tiny mistake and you lose downforce, you go into a corner and you have understeer that then goes into oversteer,” he explained. You can see where this is going: the RB21 demands near-perfect inputs and conditions; the VCARB02 gives its drivers a platform to lean on. When the sun hits, it sings. When the wind changes, it doesn’t break your back.
That distinction matters. At Albert Park, in only his second start of the year, Tsunoda stuck the VCARB on the third row. Since then, Hadjar and Lawson have thrived in Faenza-friendly machinery, banking the kind of steady points that swing a midfield season. Red Bull, meanwhile, expected Tsunoda to get closer to Verstappen and help tilt the constructors’ balance. It never quite happened.
By now the path forward is clear. Red Bull has decided Tsunoda won’t be part of its 2026 reset, with Hadjar stepping up for the first year of new regulations. Tsunoda won’t drop back into Racing Bulls either; he’s being kept in the family as a reserve. For a driver who’s been open about how long he chased the senior seat, it’s a cruel twist that the car he helped build became the one he wanted to be in the most—right after he left it.
Still, Tsunoda isn’t crying over the decision. “Missing out on that and finishing without finally being able to get to the level we wanted is something that I miss,” he said. “But I don’t regret the move.”
There’s a subtext here that’s worth hearing. Tsunoda’s ceiling has always been tied to confidence, and confidence requires a car that speaks your language. The Racing Bulls did. The Red Bull rarely has for anyone not named Max. Sometimes the bravest career move is also the one that shows you exactly what you walked away from.
What’s next? A winter as one of the most experienced, race-sharp reserves on the market, and a 2026 driver carousel likely to spin faster than advertised. Tsunoda’s stock hasn’t vanished—far from it. He’s quick, he’s grown up a ton inside the Red Bull system, and he knows what a good car should feel like because he helped build one. That won’t be lost on team principals looking at a blank sheet of paper and a brand-new rulebook.
For now, though, 2025 will sting. It’s the season Tsunoda finally got the call he wanted—and learned the better car might’ve been the one he left in the other garage.
