Yuki Tsunoda used the platform of his home Japanese Grand Prix to reframe what success looks like for him in 2026. After scraping into Q3 at Suzuka against expectations set by a difficult build-up, the Japanese driver said the priority for the weekend was not just points — it was learning the car.
Speaking to media after qualifying, Tsunoda admitted he had walked into the session braced for an early exit.
"I knew it was going to be very hard to get to Q3 considering all the practice sessions," Tsunoda said. "But the car felt very different in qualifying, not very much in a good way. It was just very hard to drive, but it was better. Honestly, top P7 was like my unachievable goal, and we are very close to it."
That lap, on a track that traditionally rewards confidence over caution, was one of his stronger qualifying performances of the season. It also masked how unsettled the package felt underneath him.
What made his post-session reflection unusual was the framing he applied to race day. Asked about expectations for Sunday, Tsunoda turned the conventional answer on its head.
"It's going to be like already scoring a point considering how close it is with the cars around me," Tsunoda said. "It's going to be tricky, but of course points is the target. The end goal is not to score points tomorrow. It's to understand how we can make that car faster."
That is the language of a driver thinking in seasons, not race weekends. The 2026 regulations are still young; teams are several months into a learning curve that will run for the rest of the year. For drivers in midfield seats, the temptation is to chase the immediate haul of points and trust the team to fix the car later. Tsunoda is making the opposite bet — that whatever he learns in race conditions about the car's limits will be worth more than a single P10 finish in the championship table.
It also reads as a self-aware response to a tricky stretch. The 2025 silly-season carousel that culminated in his promotion to Red Bull Racing alongside Max Verstappen has given Tsunoda a higher-stakes seat than he has ever had. The 2026 car has not made it easy on either side of the garage. Verstappen himself, asked the same weekend, told media bluntly that the team had bigger problems than they did the previous year, and that some parts of the car were not working how Red Bull wanted them to.
Tsunoda's mindset response — to use race day as data rather than a leaderboard — is the version of that reality framed for the long haul. It also lines up with how senior figures at Red Bull have publicly described the season: a development project that needs every track day to feed back into the next iteration of the car.
For Tsunoda, the home weekend offered a frame to say the unsayable for a Red Bull driver: that points are not the only thing that matters right now. Whether Suzuka's lessons translate into a quicker car in Miami, Imola or beyond will be the better measure of his weekend than the raw result alone.
Source: youtube.com