Did ‘image’ problem cause Red Bull to overlook Yuki Tsunoda?

Yuki Tsunoda has admitted that his rookie F1 season created an “image” problem which may have led to him being overlooked for a Red Bull seat.

The 24-year-old Japanese racer was snubbed by Red Bull, who instead picked Racing Bulls teammate Liam Lawson to race alongside world champion Max Verstappen in 2025 following their decision to ditch Sergio Perez.

Lawson got the nod despite only contesting 11 grands prix spread over two seasons and not convincingly outperforming Tsunoda during their spell together as teammates at Red Bull’s sister team.

But Tsunoda, who will spend a fifth campaign at Racing Bulls this year, reckons his chances of promotion to the senior squad were hurt by his emotional outbursts over team radio, which became a theme of his first season in F1 back in 2021.

“I think that part of it is kind of my fault because I wasn’t really able to perform straight away in the first year. It creates a bit of an image of who I am,” Tsunoda told Motorsport.

“[In 2024], even though I was performing well, I feel like didn’t I get really get credit as much as probably other drivers get, but it is what it is. I just naturally, just keep what I’m doing and performing well and just prove them wrong.

“I just try to give them fewer excuses or reasons why I am not in the seat. So, I just focus on what I can control those things other than that, just accept the situation. I’m sure I can do a better job than what they are thinking.”

Tsunoda believes he has done a lot of work to successfully improve his temperament in recent years.

"I would say the communications side has improved, mainly my language on the radio,” he explained. “The calmness, I would say, is also definitely improved, more technical feedback, more focused.

“I can definitely feel the improvement throughout the year and I'm very happy with it. What I have to improve more is still the technical feedback, especially the amount of feedback you can give in the race, I think I definitely can say more, and sometimes it's not really consistent.

"For us it was more difficult to consistently show our performance. Even though you have a good performance, sometimes the car's performance doesn't really follow that. But still, I'm pretty happy with the consistency so far. I always say I could have done a couple of races much better, but I showed I'm pretty consistent.

"I started really well, and I was in the points pretty consistently, because also the car was pretty good. At some point, and we weren't able to improve our car with upgrades and actually Haas and other competitors started to overtake our car performance.”

Marko’s admission about Tsunoda snub

Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko implied Tsunoda’s emotional outbursts were a factor behind the decision to instead promote Lawson.

Explaining why Red Bull opted against signing Tsunoda despite him being “faster” than Lawson, Marko told Sport: “In terms of speed, Tsunoda is definitely the faster of the two at the moment, but he lacks the necessary consistency and continues to make mistakes.

"His outbursts of anger have improved considerably but remain an issue. He loses control,” the 81-year-old Austrian added.

“We believe it would cause significant emotional challenges for Tsunoda if he realised alongside Max that he couldn’t beat him, or perhaps even get close to him, and that things weren’t going as he had imagined." 

Tsunoda’s future beyond the end of 2025 is uncertain, with Red Bull team principal Christian Horner admitting he could be released from the team’s driver pool.

"To be honest, I don't really care much about what people are saying on social media, because they don't know what exactly happening,” Tsunoda said.

"It only matters what the team thinks about me, and I feel definitely a massive support from the team. They understood every race what happened, and definitely I got a lot of trust from them. That's what always matters and I really appreciated those efforts from them."