The trials of an F1 rookie: Yuki Tsunoda on his early season struggles

Being taken under the wing more directly of a team that specialises in nurturing young drivers can only be to Tsunoda’s benefit. But this doesn’t mean he’s some delinquent who needs to be kept on a tight leash; instead, he is a promising raw talent who needs moulding. Tsunoda recognises that and is every bit as hard a taskmaster as Marko is.

“I naturally put more pressure on myself than other people,” says Tsunoda. “Sometimes that’s a positive and sometimes that’s a negative. I’m finding out how much pressure I can put on myself and when I can feel relaxed. Everything is a learning curve.

“After qualifying at Imola, I backed off a little bit in Q1 and lost confidence in how I pushed. Now I’m going back a little to the Imola way and need to push more from the beginning, building the confidence every race weekend. I’m not feeling very relaxed about that and realise that I need to build up slowly, because in F1, if you have a small or big snap, it’s very easy to crash.”

According to Tsunoda, AlphaTauri has taken a matter-of-fact approach to his teething troubles. It’s not about multiplying the pressure on him but more a question of highlighting the areas for improvement. You can see it even in the way he conducts himself out of the car, with his initial youthful exuberance tempered and a more worldly character being carved out by his experience.

And experience, or the lack thereof, is his main problem. Selecting when to attack and when to consolidate is a key skill of any elite athlete, and it can take drivers years to strike that balance. Speed can be innate to an extent, but it must be refined.

At Monaco, for example, Tsunoda promised a steady approach and accepted that you “can’t go full send immediately” but then cost himself significant practice time by crashing. Mind you, he wasn’t the only driver to hit the wall exiting the Swimming Pool section, so this could be easily shrugged off as a rookie error.

What happened on at the Spanish Grand Prix qualifying, where he yelled “I can’t f***ing believe this car” over the radio, having failed to reach Q3, then followed that up with an extraordinary complaint during a post-session TV interview suggesting that his car might not be of the same standard as his team-mate’s?

Tsunoda is generally unapologetic for his agitation over the radio, but he’s contrite regarding this situation. “What I said in Barcelona was unacceptable,” he admits. “It was ridiculous radio. The only thing I wanted to say was a bad excuse. I feel a lot of regret. Sometimes I get really frustrated, because I try to improve quickly and want the result.”

Tsunoda’s radio chatter certainly took his team aback during his early test outings last year. There were concerns that he wasn’t ready for F1 and that Honda’s desire to have its proteÃgeà in the car in the final season before it quits F1 led to a premature promotion. Those concerns were eased by progress in testing before the season reawakened the doubts.

However, as Tsunoda himself has said, F1 is meant to be difficult. Most rookies go through some version of these struggles; it’s how effectively they learn from them that matters. And if Tsunoda can do that and join the dots of his peaks of performance, he has the speed to make an impact.

His drive from as low as 17th on his debut in Bahrain to ninth for two championship points was excellent, showing a combination of impressive pace and decisive passing moves.

At Imola he was on course for points before spinning while rather audaciously trying to overtake Sir Lewis Hamilton, and in Spain he pulled off a great around-the-outside pass on Williams man George Russell before his race was curtailed by an engine-related problem. Then, despite dropping two places on the first lap following a late-race restart, he finished a creditable seventh in Azerbaijan.

These moments show the driver that Tsunoda can be. What’s more, it’s not simply a question of him always being ultra-attacking and sometimes pulling it off: he has shown real restraint at times, notably on opening laps, where he admits that he hasn’t been attacking enough.