VCARB racing director Alan Permane has added his support for Yuki Tsunoda, saying a promotion to Red Bull Racing should “absolutely” be his goal.

Tsunoda has been the strongest performing driver at VCARB this season but is understood to not be in the running for a step up to Red Bull Racing as speculation swirls about the possibility of Sergio Perez being replaced.

Alan Permane: I rate Yuki Tsunoda a lot

The leading contender for the seat alongside Max Verstappen at Red Bull, should a decision be made to drop Sergio Perez from the line-up, is Liam Lawson – the Kiwi driver stepped in to replace the struggling Daniel Ricciardo after the Singapore Grand Prix.

But it’s Tsunoda who has been the star performer at VCARB throughout F1 2024, seeing off the challenge of Ricciardo with ease, while he continues to have the upper hand against Lawson – Tsunoda finished ninth in Las Vegas while Lawson was 16th, while the Japanese driver scored a stellar seventh place in the wet conditions in Sao Paulo.

Tsunoda’s scoring 30 of VCARB’s 46 points has kept the Italian squad in contention for a possible sixth-place finish in the Constructors’ Championship as F1 enters the final two race weekends but, despite his strong form, Tsunoda does not appear to be a contender to become Verstappen’s teammate.

VCARB racing director Alan Permane, who began work with the Faenza-based squad this year, said Tsunoda has impressed him greatly since they began working together, while also saying it’s evident there are still areas he can improve.

“I think he’s very good. He’s still improving, and I think he knows that,” Permane told PlanetF1.com at the Qatar Grand Prix.

“He knows the areas he needs to work on, and he continually works on them.

“But his pace, I mean, we saw it in Brazil in the wet, he was phenomenal, and equally decent in the race. He didn’t make any mistakes or anything like that in a very tricky race.

“Vegas, where we started with a car that was a long way off in FP1, we had a new rear suspension there, and we certainly weren’t on top of it, but we got there and he had a very decent qualifying to qualify seventh, and, again, had a strong race without mistakes.

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“I rate Yuki a lot. I certainly rate him more now that I’m working with him and know him a little bit more than I did from the outside. He’s had some very decent races.

“He has undoubtedly some areas that he needs to polish up on. You know, he had a big crash in qualifying in Hungary, where he was heading for a really super lap time.

“He had a big crash in Mexico again, where he was heading for a very super lap time, so there are areas where he needs to work on but the speed is there, no doubt.”

Asked whether he reckons Tsunoda is ready for the leap to a front-running team, Permane said it would be a source of pride for him if it were to occur.

“I think that’s for us to keep working with him and working on it,” he said.

“I said to him yesterday that there’s a lot of talk about him and the Red Bull seat, and that’s his goal. It absolutely should be his goal.

“I said, nothing would make me prouder if that happened and I was a little bit of a part of that.

“You know, it fits in with our goals. They’re completely compatible. Our goal at the moment is to finish sixth in the championship, and have these next two races as strong as we can – all that’s completely compatible with what Yuki wants to do.

“If it doesn’t happen this year, it doesn’t mean it’s over.

“It just means we need to put a perfect year in next year, so that he’s up on Christian [Horner’s] and Helmut [Marko]’s radar to take him there. But so his goals and our goals, they’re the same really.”

Yuki Tsunoda: I hope I’m in the mix for the second Red Bull seat

Tsunoda himself expressed confusion over the matter when he spoke to media, including PlanetF1.com, on Thursday in Qatar, where he was asked whether he sees himself as a possible contender to replace Perez.

“I don’t know. Please could you interview them and find out?” he said.

“To be honest, I don’t know. Even whatever they say in the interview, even they say, ‘Yuki is in the mix’, I don’t know if that’s the truth or not to be honest.

“So, yeah, I hope I’m in that mix, and if not, I don’t know what I should do more than this, to be honest.

“I’ll just keep pushing and things I can control. And those things, the Red Bull seat, they decide everything. I’m sure if I’m in the seat, I can fight for a higher Constructors’ Championship [position] and what they want.

“But, other things, politics things. They decide what they want.

“Historically looking back, it’s pretty natural that the driver, for example, in our team, if one driver outperforms the other driver like this consistently the last few years, you get promoted. It’s kind of a natural thing.

“Maybe something changed. The dynamics maybe changed, Red Bull itself changed after Mr. Mateschitz passed away.

“I mean, one of the drivers has got a Drivers’ Championship, and this is a team that has had success since quite a long time, so what they’re doing is I guess not a bad thing, but it doesn’t really make sense for me that I didn’t really be in the mix much so far.

“I don’t know much. For myself at least, I can’t find much reasons why they’re not really, so far, talking about me heavily.”

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