SPA-FRANCORCHAMPS, Belgium — Yuki Tsunoda lauded his newly-upgraded Red Bull car after delivering his best qualifying performance since joining the team in April.
Tsunoda qualified seventh in Belgium on Saturday despite languishing outside the top 10 in both sprint qualifying and the sprint race.
Before qualifying for the main grand prix Red Bull fitted an upgraded floor to the Japanese driver’s car, something which had not been planned coming into the weekend.
Tsunoda has struggled to come close to teammate Max Verstappen since replacing Liam Lawson three races into the season but felt a big step forward with the upgraded car.
“I’m happy with it,” Tsunoda said of his performance. “Also, the team did a good job to bring me the upgrades just before qualifying. That was big enough to be in this position. Certainly I feel much better.”
Tsunoda had come into the weekend expecting to be behind Verstappen in terms of the development specification of either car.
Verstappen, running a full Red Bull upgrade, won Saturday’s sprint race and will start Sunday’s race from fourth.
Tsunoda’s improved performance will be encouraging for new Red Bull boss Laurent Mekies, who replaced Christian Horner two weeks ago.
Mekies worked alongside him all of last year and in the opening two races of 2025 as Racing Bulls team boss.
“We upgraded his car just before qualifying as we are always pushing to the edge on our car parts quantity,” Mekies told F1 TV on Saturday. “But we decided to take the risk to upgrade his car, so that’s why you may have seen we were nearly a bit late to go out in qualifying.”
With the new part, Tsunoda felt vindicated about recent feedback he’s been giving.
Asked what the new floor gave him in the car, he said: “Bit more grip! Literally. We saw already on the paper how much difference we had [to Verstappen], I don’t know how many races we had. But considering the difference I had in terms of delta lap time I have between Max and myself, wasn’t that huge.
“I knew already in myself and engineering group we are in the right direction for myself to improve the way we want. Happy that I proved it.
“Generally a bit more grip … just grip was what was a bit more sensitive with anything [before]. It never followed [my inputs]. This one handled like… you can be aggressive with it.”
Tsunoda has only finished in the points twice in Sunday races since stepping up to Red Bull, finishing 10th in Miami and Imola.
Since then, he has finished 17th, 13th, 12th, 16th and 15th.
He had finished Saturday’s sprint race in 11th.
