Christian Horner says they want Yuki Tsunoda to follow his own route rather than follow previous F1 drivers who tried to copy Max Verstappen’s set-up.
After a bad Barcelona weekend, Red Bull’s Tsunoda hoped for a better run in F1 Canadian GP, where he was to get the updates that he lost in the Imola incident. He was back on par with Verstappen, which was positive for the Japanese to not fall too far behind.
After a decent Friday, he had issues in FP3 which eventually cost him in qualifying, as he ended up last despite P11 finish after penalty. The team decided to start on from the grid in 18th and he made steady progress. But his chances were limited since the cars around him were on the same strategy.
The key hurdles were Esteban Ocon and Carlos Sainz, who denied him getting into the Top 10. The second stop was slightly slow which threw him into traffic and he had to recover the lost places. Eventually, it was not enough to get into the points in yet another grand prix.
Post-race, he wasn’t too happy, even though he agreed that it was not as messy as previous races. “The pace wasn’t great, it was all right,” said Tsunoda to media. “It was more normal I guess compared to last races, which was good. The position that we started here in P18 on hard tyre, especially with cars around as well starting on the hard compound, so couldn’t do much…yeah, I don’t know, we were waiting for safety car but pretty much that’s it.
“It was at least clean race, qualifying was really messy with my position nonsense, loosing a lot of time in FP3, I mean at least I understand more about upgrades, new floor, which is good. If you are driving almost at the end of the pack, especially like here, you have graining which is not helping at all and even after I went on medium, I was stuck in traffic, so at no moment I had a track in clean air to cool the tyres, so that was the main point,” summed up Tsunoda.
Team boss Horner felt the Japanese did good enough job considering the situation. He had the grid penalty which made things tougher but he drove well. “I thought his race was actually to do a one-stop on that tyre,” he said to media. “And once you’ve gone through the graining, the tyre’s cleaned up again. I thought he actually did a decent job. You can see how hard overtaking is here.
“So, actually, I thought Yuki should have taken some confidence out of it. If he’d have started in his normal grid position if he’d qualified, he would have scored points,” summed up Horner, who notes that they are trying that Tsunoda doesn’t fall in the same trap as his predecessor of copying Verstappen’s set-up, which is difficult to drive.
“We’re just trying to avoid what other drivers have gone down the road of, trying to adopt Max’s set-up, is to go his own route and work on what suits his style and his needs,” continued Horner. “And I think they’ve made some progress on that this weekend. It’s the same spec as he had in Imola and now back to where he is with Max. So, yeah, hopefully he’ll take some real positives out of the weekend.”
Here’s George Russell, Toto Wolff on Max Verstappen
Here’s Max Verstappen, Christian Horner on Canadian GP
