Is New AlphaTauri Driver Yuki Tsunoda Ready For Formula 1?

Last year, Red Bull Racing claims that their sister program AlphaTauri, formerly Scuderia Toro Rosso, is no longer a junior team. This year, they replaced veteran driver Daniil Kvyat with a 20 year old rookie who only began racing internationally in the calendar year 2019.

This is the tenth installment of our driver-by-driver preview of the 2021 Formula 1 season. This weekend, we will be covering AlphaTauri. You can find the rest of our previews here.

Tsunoda is hardly the first Red Bull Racing prospect to be brought to Formula 1 at 20 years old. He is also far from the first to be brought to this level without spending enough time in the higher levels of junior competition to familiarize himself with the intricacies of European open wheel racing. He is, however, the latest to do so, and he follows in the path of careers both made and destroyed by Red Bull Racing.

HOW HE GOT HERE

Tsunoda actually began his career as a Honda prospect, not a Red Bull-affiliated driver. He entered cars for the first time in 2016, joining Japan’s domestic Formula 4 competition with Honda affiliation. He scored a podium in one of the two races he entered, and earned a full time drive for the next year. 2017 saw him finish third in the category with three wins, and 2018 saw him win a championship with seven.

Honda’s strong F1 ties with Red Bull led Tsunoda to their farm system in 2019, a year he spent finishing a respectable-but-uninspiring ninth in FIA Formula 3. In 2020, he was promoted to Formula 2, where he finished a stellar third as a rookie in a series that traditionally skews more toward rewarding experience than young talent. He scored four poles in twelve opportunities and was alive in the championship hunt until the last weekend of the season, ultimately losing the title to fellow 2021 rookie Mick Schumacher.

Honda and Red Bull are splitting up after the 2021 season, but their departure from F1 has not stopped Red Bull Racing from accepting their outgoing partner’s top prospect as their own. Tsunoda will make his Formula 1 debut at just 20 years old and with just two years of experience in the European junior formula ladder, a timeline that seems fairly standard for a Red Bull-affiliated driver but would scream inexperience at any other team.

GOALS FOR 2021

A surprising number of moves between veteran drivers mean that Tsunoda is one of just three rookies this year, and, with Haas rookies Mazepin and Schumacher each a year older, he will be the youngest driver on the grid. That, combined with his relative inexperience, mean his biggest challenge for 2021 will be simply adapting to the rigors of an F1 season in a time where driver development is very much not a focus.

Mazepin and Schumacher each have a very obvious goal, to outrun their teammate and be the best rookie at Haas F1. Tsunoda is not so lucky. His teammate, Pierre Gasly, is currently on his second stint at the team now known as AlphaTauri and is coming off an excellent season where he not only outperformed expectations but actually won a race for a team that did not win in the entire past decade. Outperforming Gasly is theoretically possible, and would certainly vault Tsunoda into many conversations about where he should go next, but it is an unrealistic goal for a 20 year old rookie.

Instead, his goal needs to be getting up to speed quickly. That means showing his one-lap pace in qualifying, making the right decisions during races, and keeping the car in one piece so he can be in position to fight for points-paying positions at the end of races.

WHERE TO IMPROVE

Tsunoda’s relative inexperience means that he also does not have a significant bank of past results to draw from. He is not as much of an unknown quantity as Max Verstappen, who never raced a single season in a high-level junior formula series before entering F1, was at this point in his career, but he may be the most unknown driver since.

As a result, it is difficult to determine a set point of improvement for Tsunoda. 2021 will be his opportunity to set a baseline, a standard of expectations that both Red Bull and other teams can see as he inevitably auditions for opportunities with bigger and better teams.

WHAT A SUCCESSFUL SEASON WOULD LOOK LIKE

It is no secret that Red Bull Racing is only committed to Sergio Perez, the strong veteran driver they liked enough to drop the young Alex Albon after just two years, for one season. Red Bull has a long history of pushing drivers out of the way, either directly to make room for another driver they have an interest in or indirectly by putting them in an uncomfortable second driver situation when they had proven they had the talent to win in another opportunity. If Tsunoda wants it, 2021 could be the year he auditions for Red Bull’s opening in 2022.

In that case, he would be compared directly to all of Perez, Albon, and his current AlphaTauri teammate, Pierre Gasly, among others. But his prize would be the opportunity to play second fiddle to Max Verstappen, a role that has led directly to Daniel Ricciardo leaving the program that made him a race winner voluntarily and both Albon and Gasly being demoted after a very short time. Any offer for him to drive that car would also mean that Sergio Perez would have been dropped after just one year, the fourth driver to leave that car in four seasons.

That should not interest Tsunoda. He is a viable prospect who can fight for wins for another team. Carlos Sainz Jr. came to Scuderia Toro Rosso as an inexperienced prospect, and he turned that opportunity into a chance with other teams that eventually became a seat at Scuderia Ferrari.

If Tsunoda wants to be a lead driver somewhere else, he might be better-served by spending 2021 proving he can be a successful F1 driver, turning down the Red Bull seat anyway, and preparing for his next move outside of the program. As long as Max Verstappen is at Red Bull, AlphaTauri is something of a dead end, the second-to-last step at a ladder that ends well before any worthwhile destination. With Honda, his original benefactor, leaving the series, and Renault, Ferrari, and McLaren all without a clear-cut top driver, Tsunoda has the chance to use that opportunity to vault toward something else entirely; He might be wise to build his resume with Red Bull only to explore those avenues instead.

From: Road & Track

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