How Tsunoda already puts Lawson – and Red Bull – under pressure

It’s very early days. F1’s 2025 season has only just started. But making an impression in a Formula 1 paddock is somewhat similar to a date: the initial impact really matters. You screw the first few lines during a dinner at a restaurant, and it’s almost impossible to recover. You get knocked out in the first segment in qualifying two times in a row while driving one of the best cars on the grid, and people already start to question whether you’re good enough for the job.

Liam Lawson was always going to be in the hot seat in the first few races. Red Bull has put a lot of faith in New Zealander by promoting him to the senior team after just 11 race starts in F1 – at the expense of Yuki Tsunoda, who’s now starting his fifth season with the junior squad.

Even if no one expected Lawson to immediately match Max Verstappen’s levels of performance, simply showing better results than Sergio Perez did at the end of last year would have been considered satisfying for someone who the F1 world is still struggling to remove the ‘rookie’ tag from. And with all due respect to the Mexican, it didn’t look like a completely impossible task.

But Lawson’s first full race weekend as a Red Bull Racing driver in Melbourne topped most of Perez’s underperformances from last year: he was out in Q1 in qualifying and had a really challenging race, struggling to make ground initially and then crashing out when the rain really intensified at the end. Even Isack Hadjar, who probably had one of the worst weekends of his life, managed to impress more, having at least showed his speed in qualifying.

The first day in China didn’t go well either, with Lawson not only getting knocked out of SQ1 but ending up last – with Verstappen, who’s always there to provide the highest benchmark possible, missing pole by just 0.018s.

The very first impression wasn’t great. Not to the extent that “the date” is about to be over before the main course arrives – but Lawson, for sure, is already on the back foot.

At the same time, the New Zealander’s failure to impress was probably the only scenario in which the spotlight could return to Tsunoda. And it was a matter of time – relatively short time, as it always is in F1 – before the first evaluations of Red Bull’s winter choices would appear in the media.

Of course, Zak Brown’s Tsunoda praise and Lawson criticism shall be taken with a pinch of salt. After all, how could McLaren’s team boss miss an opportunity to play mind games with a driver who drives for a potential title rival team?

But it wasn’t at all unfounded either.

It would have been to some extent expected to see Tsunoda frustrated and even demotivated after another Red Bull snub. But he did come out of the winter fighting.

“He probably left to Japan at the end of last year with a disappointment, as probably we would all feel,” Racing Bulls’ team boss Laurent Mekies told Motorsport.com in Shanghai. “It was visible, and rightly so. I think he actually got the news when he was there, but it was not looking good when he left.

Laurent Mekies, Team Principal, Racing Bulls F1 Team

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

“And it was always going to be a question mark, how he’s processing that and which mindset he’s coming back [in]. When he came back to Europe, honestly, we saw straight away that he was in super strong spirits. Already in the opening weeks of work in Faenza, in the simulator, he was in very, very strong spirits straight away. High motivation, very focused, down to the details, hard willingness to work even harder than what he was doing.

“And then we went to the Bahrain test, and in the Bahrain test, after those three days, we looked at each other and we said, ‘We have another Yuki’. That’s what we said to each other internally.

“You heard us very often last year saying that Yuki has made a huge step last year, and that’s how we felt. And we don’t think it’s only what you see on the radio or the feedback. It’s a global step. You go faster in the car, you are more consistent, the speed is going up, the technical feedback is going up. And we always say it’s going to be, I guess, our responsibility to make sure that, if there are more steps, we have the environment for him to extract them.

“And straight away after Bahrain, we saw he’s doing stuff that he was not doing last year. In terms of what he was reporting from the car, in terms of what he was doing in the car, and in terms of how much more of a leadership role he was taking in the team. And we said it to each other, and also to him.”

Yuki Tsunoda, RB F1 Team VCARB 02, Laurent Mekies, Team Principal of Visa Cash App Racing Bulls

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

Tsunoda’s Melbourne weekend – in contrast to Lawson’s – was almost perfect until the rain threw the team’s strategies out of whack. He qualified fifth, ahead not only of a Red Bull car he wanted to be in, but also both Ferraris. He then was on course to finish the race sixth, but the wrong call by the team – with Mekies admitting a mistake by the pitwall – meant that he ultimately failed to capitalise on his strong form.

“He did a huge weekend in Melbourne,” Mekies said. “Huge weekend. In the car, outside of the car. And I’m sure you’ve seen him. Sky-high motivation. Very much pulling the team also in the most difficult moments, which you always have in the weekend. And in the car, another step of speed, of control and of feedback.

“So what can I tell you? You come from a very good sample. But I guess what I’m trying to tell is that it was not only the Melbourne one-lap qualifying [pace]. It was a very, very huge weekend. Including in the race up until he was there…

“And we saw the signs of that already earlier this winter when he came back.”

Yuki Tsunoda, Racing Bulls F1 Team

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

The end result was the only thing missing in Australia for Tsunoda – and it also hasn’t gone unnoticed that even during the phase of the race where the Japanese driver lost several positions through no fault of his own, he remained calm on the radio. And even if the importance of his emotionality has been overblown at times, it’s still impressive to notice Tsunoda didn’t provide the F1 broadcast crew with some juicy rant on the team radio.

“To make you smile,” said Mekies. “After that last [wrong strategy] call he was trying to cheer us up on the radio. Which you imagine for all the emotion of the guys fighting for it for an hour and a half… It tells a lot about how much he is surprising us by his capability to improve and progress.”

That aspect received particular attention last year, with the team’s racing director Alan Permane revealing that they watched onboards of top drivers together with Tsunoda to improve communication. It seems that this work is starting to pay off as well – yet Mekies dismisses any claim that this is the team’s achievement.

“I think he should take the credit for that, Yuki,” he says. “Because as non-drivers we look at everything in a very rational way and then the game is probably different once you are out there closing your visors fighting with the top guys for whatever, 45 laps in the wet. So credit to him. He was outstanding. Part of the weekend in Melbourne was, he was certainly outstanding also in the way he interacted with his team outside of the radio – but on the radio in a race like that where you need good communication, he was very, very good.”

And it’s not only Mekies who’s seeing a “different” Tsunoda this year, but Helmut Marko as well.

“Yuki is in the form of his life so far,” he told Motorsport.com after sprint qualifying in Shanghai, where the Japanese again was best of the rest – behind only Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes, and Verstappen’s Red Bull.

Praise doesn’t get much better than this with Marko.

Helmut Marko, advisor, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Either way, regardless of the reasons, Tsunoda didn’t get the end result to stick – and while performance may soon be forgotten, it’s the result that will stick in memory. If Tsunoda really wants to capitalise on Lawson’s struggles, he needs to keep performing at the same level consistently, without letting frustration creep in when results slip away from him.

After all, it’s Tsunoda’s mental strength that Marko cited as the main reason why he was not promoted.

A lot will depend on Racing Bulls’ performance, but also on Lawson’s form. And even if it’s hard to imagine his season starting in even worse fashion, it is much too early to question his immediate future. His Red Bull date isn’t over yet – and at least in public, Marko and Christian Horner are willing to wait and be patient.

One of the reasons for Lawson’s promotion, as Red Bull bosses always underlined, was his alleged ability not to crack under pressure.

“I think Liam’s got a pretty sensible head on his shoulders,” Horner repeated once again on Friday in Shanghai during the team principals’ press conference, which took place right before sprint qualifying. “It was a tough baptism for him. He still came away with the second fastest race lap [in Melbourne]. And I just told him: ‘Ignore the naysayers, ignore social media, put your head down and you’ll be fine.’ He just needs a bit of time.”

What is sure is that Lawson’s said strength is now really going to be stress-tested, as the pressure is already piling up – whether in the form of questions from the media, Brown’s comments, or even memes on social media, which already compare him to Perez. And along with him, the entire Red Bull driver programme is being stress-tested as well – the same programme that, after bringing Verstappen to F1, failed to produce a second driver who wouldn’t look average next to him.

Or, perhaps, did produce such a driver – but has simply failed to trust him.

Yuki Tsunoda, Racing Bulls F1 Team

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool