OVERVIEW
Yuki Tsunoda has spent four seasons doing what Red Bull's junior programme asks: driving fast, learning slowly, and waiting for a promotion that kept arriving for other people. From AlphaTauri in 2023 to RB in 2024 to Red Bull Racing in 2025, the Japanese driver's career trajectory has been the Formula One equivalent of a long commute -- always moving, never quite arriving.
Seventy-one races across three seasons in the dataset, a best finish of sixth, an average hovering between 12.6 and 13.2 depending on the year. Tsunoda has been a fixture of the lower midfield, scoring twenty-one points in 2025 at Red Bull Racing -- a number that invites the question of whether the big team's car underperformed or whether its second driver did.
The answer, as usual with Tsunoda, is somewhere in between. He carries the number 22 and a reputation for speed on his good days and frustration on his bad ones. The 2025 move to Red Bull Racing was the opportunity he spent years earning. The data suggests he took it seriously but could not quite capitalize on it.
SEASON BY SEASON
2023 at AlphaTauri was the baseline. Twenty-three races, an average finish of 13.0, a best of eighth, and a grid average of 13.7. Tsunoda was a mid-pack presence, qualifying in the low teens and occasionally improving on Sundays. Nothing dramatic. Nothing disastrous. The numbers of a competent midfielder.
2024 at RB (same team, new name) was similar but slightly worse. The average finish ticked up to 13.2, but the grid average improved to 11.1 -- meaning Tsunoda was qualifying better but finishing worse. He was losing an average of two positions per race, suggesting improved one-lap pace but declining race management or a car that degraded its tyres.
2025 at Red Bull Racing was supposed to be the vindication. Instead, it produced an average finish of 12.6, a best of sixth, and twenty-one points -- numbers that look modest beside Verstappen's dominant output in the same machinery. The early season was particularly difficult: twelfth, sixteenth, twelfth, ninth. A retirement at round six. The car was quick; Tsunoda was not always quick enough to exploit it.
The second half improved. Sixth at round eighteen and seventh at round twenty were genuine results in a competitive car. But the consistency never materialized -- twelfth and seventeenth-place finishes continued to punctuate the better results.
DRIVING STYLE
Tsunoda's compound data is the most revealing of any driver in this cohort. His soft-tyre count of 681 laps is extraordinarily high relative to his peers -- 16% of his total racing laps. Compare this to Ocon's 365 or Hulkenberg's 491, and the picture is clear: Tsunoda runs softs more aggressively and more frequently than the midfield norm.
The hard count of 1,696 leads, with mediums at 1,482 and intermediates at 299 (another high figure). The wet tally of 5 laps is negligible. What emerges is a driver who is comfortable on extremes -- soft tyres for pace, hard tyres for endurance -- but whose medium-tyre running is proportionally lower than his competitors.
The qualifying-to-race delta tells the uncomfortable truth. In 2025, Tsunoda averaged 12.8 on the grid and 12.6 at the finish -- essentially flat. At Red Bull Racing, alongside Verstappen, that grid position was already a significant deficit to his teammate, and the inability to consistently improve on Sundays compounded the problem.
The scatter chart shows a driver without a clear performance band. Tsunoda's finishes are scattered broadly from sixth to nineteenth, with no settled territory. This is the antithesis of the consistency that top teams demand. The speed is there -- the sixth at round eighteen, the seventh at round twenty prove that. But the twelfths, the sixteenths, the seventeenths are never far behind. Tsunoda races like a man who has all the tools but cannot always find the right one.