‘Surviving okay’: Tsunoda faces Red Bull exit and a year on the sidelines after Qatar call
The conversation came after parc fermé, away from the cameras, and with all the subtlety you’d expect in Red Bull land. Yuki Tsunoda, told by Helmut Marko after the Qatar Grand Prix that he won’t be racing in 2026, says the reality still hasn’t fully landed.
“Obviously I’m disappointed, and p***ed off,” he admitted when he finally faced the media in Abu Dhabi. “How I was told was right after the race [in Qatar], from Helmut, privately, that I’m not racing next year. Surprisingly, I’m okay. Not okay, like, I’m surviving okay.”
It’s a brutally Red Bull storyline even by their standards. Tsunoda was vaulted into the senior team early in 2025 after Liam Lawson’s stuttering start; the logic was clear enough: more experience, fewer mistakes. But the numbers told their own story. Across 21 weekends, Tsunoda has banked 30 points in the RB21; Max Verstappen, in identical machinery, has amassed a title-challenging 396. It’s been the most lopsided partnership on the grid.
Qatar was the latest snapshot in miniature: Verstappen won, Tsunoda scraped a point in P10, and the next chapter was delivered shortly after the cooldown. He won’t be shunted back to Racing Bulls — the team with whom he made his F1 debut under the AlphaTauri banner in 2021 and raced through to the end of 2024. Instead, he’ll stay on Red Bull’s books next year as a reserve driver while his grand prix career pauses.
If you’re wondering why he didn’t have a Plan B when the winds began to shift, Tsunoda says his hands were tied. “I didn’t have options,” he said. “My contract was there so I couldn’t do much. I had a couple of interests from externally, but my contract doesn’t really allow me to talk a lot with them, whatever. So that’s why I was really focused on Red Bull and, anyway, it was my priority for the last few years, the Red Bull family, because this is where I grew up.”
There’s a familiar ache to it all if you’ve followed this sport for more than five minutes. Seats vanish overnight. The ladder is crowded, the stopwatch merciless. But this isn’t an obituary. Drivers do come back. Sabbatical seasons have long stopped being career enders, and Tsunoda, 25, isn’t short of admirers in the paddock.
He’s trying to lean into that idea. “I’m excited to see from a different perspective, different eyes, next year, because for the first time in my career, I’m not racing,” he said. “I was not really sitting down in an office while people are racing. I can see more overview, and communication every driver is doing. Maybe I can learn a lot of things that I never imagined now.”
That’s the public face. Privately, the sting is obvious. He admits it hasn’t quite sunk in, recalling the morning after the call when he ordered the same breakfast as usual out of habit. The hope is that time in the simulator, time in briefings, and time to sharpen the edges will give him a better shot if a door opens mid-season or for 2027. “Still try to be in this shape as much as possible so, when any opportunity comes, I’ll smash the opportunity.”
For Red Bull, the maths is hard to argue with. Verstappen’s season has been a one-man siege, and the top team’s tolerance for uneven pairings is famously low. For Tsunoda, who’s matured markedly since those ragged AlphaTauri rookie days, the frustration is that the step he craved came — and then slipped — in the space of a season.
The sport moves fast. So does Red Bull. Tsunoda, at least, is keeping his head up. Surviving, as he says. And waiting.
