What wrecked Tsunoda's debut Red Bull qualifying

You could already see the headlines pre-weekend. 'Liam Lawson outqualifies his replacement Yuki Tsunoda at the Japanese Grand Prix'. 

Given the peak of the Racing Bulls is so much more accessible than the Red Bull, it looked like a likely outcome for Saturday. 

But Tsunoda’s impressive progression through the three practice sessions and Q1 - where he was right on terms with Max Verstappen - had the promise of a headline-grabbing Red Bull debut for the right reasons. 

So how did Tsunoda end up slowest of all in Q2, even behind Lawson, who was five places behind his new Racing Bulls team-mate Isack Hadjar? 

What went wrong 

Edd Straw 

Tsunoda ran with more rear wing than his team-mate and qualifying started well, the RB21 debutant breezing through Q1 in seventh place.

On the first runs, he was 0.294s off Verstappen - but closed the gap to just 0.024s with the strong second run.

Unfortunately, Q2 wasn’t so well-executed. The first run was never likely to be good enough given he ran used softs, compared to Verstappen’s fresh set, but even so his first lap was a considerable 0.652s off his team-mate.

The critical flying lap on the second run started to get away from Tsunoda even before it had begun, with a wobble at the exit of the chicane starting the lap. He then had a big snap in the turn-in phase for Turn 2, which meant we had a time-sapping wide moment.

From there, he was always up against it and only improved on his first run by 0.154s - lapping slightly slower than he had in Q1. That meant he was just over two tenths off reaching Q3, which was a disappointing performance given he did have the pace to have made the top 10 had he delivered on the second run.