Yuki Tsunoda reports on first outing in Red Bull RB21 at Suzuka

Yuki Tsunoda has opened up on how he found the RB21 during his first day on track with Red Bull.

After replacing rookie Liam Lawson at the team after two race weekends, the Japanese driver has confirmed that the RB21 feels different to the simulator runs he had completed previously. 

In the lead up to the race weekend, Tsunoda had explained that the car didn’t feel “crazy tricky” in the simulator. He commented during the drivers’ press conference in Suzuka:

“Yeah. I mean, in simulator obviously it’s not fully correct in terms of trickiness of the car, but at least it didn’t feel crazy tricky. I can feel what the drivers mentioned about the instability or lack of driving confidence.

“I did multiple set-ups that I wanted to try to make it better and those two days seemed pretty productive. I know what kind of direction I want to start and it seems to be a good baseline in terms of overall performance. So yeah, it was a really good simulator session.”

While speaking to Motorsport.com and other media, Tsunoda reflected on taking the car out onto the Suzuka circuit for the first time.

“It’s a bit different to the simulator, what I felt, to be honest, maybe a little bit more than I expected in terms of car feeling,” he said.

“I knew anyway, [that it was] gonna be, you know, [it will] always be different in the real car, and it was just a little bit more exaggerated in the real car that’s, yeah, feeling a bit more tricky.”

In FP1, Tsunoda put in the sixth fastest time and was approximately 0.1 seconds behind his new team-mate Max Verstappen. FP2 saw him down in 18th, however, the session was heavily disrupted. First of all, Alpine driver Jack Doohan crashed at Turn 1 causing a red flag, then it was halted for a second time when Fernando Alonso span out onto the gravel. Further disruptions came towards the end of the hour-long session when patches of grass beside the track caught fire. 

Tsunoda now has one more practice session tomorrow before the all-important qualifying in the afternoon.