Franz Tost is fine with the performances of Yuki Tsunoda but notes that he needs to be more disciplined, as Mattia Binotto apologises to him.
Amid the time for his contract extension, AlphaTauri’s Tsunoda faced a 10-place grid penalty in F1 Italian GP after collecting five reprimands in the season at Zandvoort. He collected it over the course of the 2022 season for various offences.
His emotions has been a problem since the start of his F1 career with Red Bull and AlphaTauri trying various things to calm him down in the car. But it ends up taking over which results in reprimands and or penalty, thereby hurting his chances of points.
Its been 10 races since Tsunoda last scored points but AlphaTauri chief Tost is not too worried about that slump. He is more focused on controlling his emotions and getting him disciplined. “His performance is increasing,” he said. “Look to the qualifying: in Zandvoort, look to FP1 in Monza. He is in the car he is doing a really good job.
“He has just to get under control his emotions and he must be more disciplined because to ignore a yellow flag in FP2 is not clever. I understand that it’s difficult in qualifying, maybe sometimes in the race but in a free practice session you in any way have to accept yellow flags and have to react in the correct way, which means you have to slow down,” summed up Tost.
For now, with the other F1 seats playing a merry-go-round scene, Tsunoda seems to be safe at AlphaTauri for another season in 2023. His situation at Zandvoort which created mass messages on social media, also caught Ferrari boss Binotto into the storm.
The Italian called him ‘tsunami’ post-race but it upset the fans in Japan, for which Binotto duly apologised. “Certainly I need to apologise and it was a mistake by using that word,” he said. “It was no intention to do any anything wrong and very close to the victims which I honestly I realized. So it was really bit too…
“I think that Tsunoda is a fantastic driver, is a great man and we’ve got a good relationship between the two(of us). And that’s a way that we simply call him in a way, to… as you said, it’s a simple joke, but it’s a bad joke,” summed up Binotto.
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