Yuki Tsunoda frustrated by Red Bull “miscommunication” after “messy” day in Bahrain
"We just have to avoid this situation in the future.”
Yuki Tsunoda suffered a “messy” opening day at the Bahrain Grand Prix, with his performance in practice being compromised by “miscommunication” with Red Bull.
After an encouraging start to life with his new team in Japan, Tsunoda appeared to take a step back in Bahrain, finishing 18th out of 20 drivers in Friday practice with a lap that was almost seven-tenths down on teammate Max Verstappen.
The 24-year-old is still adjusting to the tricky RB21, while also trying to embed himself with Red Bull after spending more than four seasons with its sister squad Racing Bulls (previously AlphaTauri).
Admitting that FP2 wasn’t his “finest session”, Tsunoda said he needs to work on the operational side with Red Bull to extract more performance from the car.
“A bit of learning, I guess,” he said. “It's a bit different also, the setup across the cars [to] kind of see how the performance looks like. This [gap is] also a little bit [down to]that as well.
“This session was just messy overall, I wasn't able to put it all together. There was also a lot of miscommunication between our side of the garage, on the radio for example.
“That is part of the learning process. It's still the fifth session from when I jumped in [at Red Bull]. It was not obviously the finest session.
“We should make it much smoother [on the] operation side, warm-up, switches and everything. It was pretty messy overall today. We just have to avoid this situation in the future.”
While Verstappen stunned the competition to score an unlikely victory in the Japanese GP last weekend, Red Bull faces a much bigger deficit to benchmark McLaren in Bahrain.
Tsunoda also isn’t too confident about his own chances at the Sakhir venue, saying even getting into the final part of qualifying will be tough for him.
Asked for his thoughts going into Saturday, he said: “I hope it will be better, it has to be better than this.
“I’m sure we are going to change a lot of things. For now, it seems struggling but at the same time, I know a lot [of time] will come from cleaner operations, everything. So I’m still feeling optimistic but it will be hard for now to go to Q3.”
