'I can beat him' - What Tsunoda's learning from Verstappen

Yuki Tsunoda believes he will be able to beat Red Bull team-mate Max Verstappen once he has unlocked all he needs from his RB21 car.

Tsunoda is making rapid progress in his understanding of Red Bull’s tricky 2025 challenger, having delivered his first points for the squad at last weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix.

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While he admits he is still in a “learning” phase with a car that is all new to him, he believes that once he is out of that phase and understands the current quirks, then good results can come.

“It's my first time driving a completely different car - I only drove with VCARB for the last four years, so it's the first time I drove a completely different team's car,” he explained at the Saudi Grand Prix. 

“I'm trying to use that, and I know that if I unlock that area, I would be able to probably beat him [Verstappen].

“I know myself that I can't beat him straight away, so I'm just trying to build a good baseline and wait for the moment that I can be in the shape, yeah.”

Tsunoda explained that his challenge at the moment is getting a better comprehension of what is needed to extract all the pace there is in the RB21.

“I'm just trying to understand how this car operates, how this car performs well,” he said. “I think I'm not really understanding even half of it. 

“These things are the key that I'm trying to work really hard on to understand as soon as possible, so I can work on different sort of stuff - all sorts of development and whatever.

“So far, I'm able to kind of put it all together in the qualifying and the race, but also at the same time it's quite up and down. There's a bit of up and down from FP1 to FP3. So I just want to be more consistent throughout.” 

While aware that Verstappen has so much more experience than him, Tsunoda says he has also observed certain ways that the four-time champion operates that he needs to tap into.

Tsunoda added: “The thing is he can feel more than myself in the car, like how the tyre temp looks getting out of the garage.

“Qualifying's a good example that [when] temps are going low, lower and lower throughout qualifying, he adjusted, Q1 to Q3 - when the temperature's going lower, he adjusted himself in the warm-up, how he should warm up, how he should put pressure into the tyres in each corner to increase the lap time or increase the pace of the outlap or whatever. 

“Inside for me, I didn't feel it that way. I wasn't able to feel what I did in the VCARB. I wasn't able to feel in this car yet, because probably just I'm not fully relaxing, driving this car. 

“I'm just still rushing and not fully in control yet. I think those few details are really important with this current regulation, which is very sensitive on tyres and even that one tenth, the few milliseconds in each corner, will make a lot of difference.”

Another aspect that Tsunoda thinks is important is how Verstappen is able to build his speed throughout the weekend - only unleashing everything when he needs to.

“I knew how Max builds throughout the week, builds the confidence throughout the week, compared to how I build the confidence throughout the week,” he said.

“It's completely different because he already has massive confidence in this car. So I just make it separate and try to nail it down in qualifying.”

And while Tsunoda and Verstappen have diverged on downforce choices for the past two weekends, with Tsunoda preferring to run higher levels because it makes him more comfortable, he says that there are a lot of similarities in how they operate a car.

“So far the driving style, actually how the brake shape is and the releasing part, everything, is quite close,” he said.

“I never thought about how the driving style between us [might compare], but so far it's not too far away.”