Christian Horner has warned Yuki Tsunoda he has to “continue to improve” at Red Bull or risk losing his seat as the team principal puts the 25-year-old under pressure for the first time in the 2025 Formula 1 season.
Tsunoda was promoted alongside Max Verstappen in April following a tough start to the campaign for Liam Lawson, who headed back in the other direction to Racing Bulls, the junior team.
The racer from Sagamihara had finally earned his shot at the big time by stepping into a race-winning car following an impressive 2024 against Daniel Ricciardo and Lawson, outscoring the pair 30-16.
However, since then, he has also ran into the same problems plaguing everyone in the second seat at Milton Keynes as he struggles to get to grips with an unpredictable rear end and narrow set-up window, car traits that only the four-time world champion seems able to handle.
Following his promotion at the Japanese GP weekend, hosted at the Suzuka Circuit from April 4-6, he has finished 12th, ninth, 10th, 10th, 17th and 13th whilst making Q3 on three occasions but also qualifying last twice.
As a result, the pressure is already starting to grow on Tsunoda and Horner already has put his Red Bull seat at risk by demanding the fifth-year driver improves his pace to support Verstappen’s title goals.
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“Yuki has the toughest job in F1 – being Max’s teammate,” Horner said, as per Bild. “Yuki is doing well so far, regularly scoring points.
“But if he wants to be considered for next year, he’ll have to continue to improve.”
Why Yuki Tsunoda isn’t the problem at Red Bull despite Horner pressure
There has been an interesting trend since 2019 of drivers moving into the Red Bull cars following promising seasons, but find themselves instantly coming undone as the engineers take the car more and more in Verstappen’s preferred direction.
For example, Pierre Gasly stepped up in 2019 after a good run of form with Toro Rosso in 2018. Yet he immediately struggled to match the pace of his teammate and was demoted back, halfway through the season. There, he found speed again. Within a year, he had won the 2020 Italian GP.
Heading in the other direction was Alex Albon, who had shown promise in his own rookie year with Toro Rosso. Whilst he managed to respectable hold on to the car for the rest of the 2019 season, his pace fell apart in 2020 with just two podiums compared to Verstappen’s 11; and he was sacked at the end of the year.
He was replaced by Sergio Perez, who had just finished fourth in the standings and won the Sakhir GP for Racing Point (now Aston Martin). In 2021 and 2022, he was also respectable but lacked the pace to fight Verstappen consistently.
Then from 2023, it all went wrong as he began to struggle with the unpredictable rear and extremely sharp front end, believing his issues could be traced back to an update at the Spanish GP that year.
Those issues only got worse throughout 2024 as he became the only driver from the lead four teams to fail to take a win, and he was eventually dismissed too at the end of a run of form that hadn’t featured him on the podium in 19 races.
Now Tsunoda seems as though he could be starting to repeat this process as he also shows the early signs of frustration with the RB21 package, appearing as though he had been crying at the end of the 2025 Spanish GP.
It’s particularly notable that, at the end of the 2024 campaign, he was widely one of the most praised drivers – celebrated for his qualifying pace and consistency across the year.
This form seemed to be carrying on into 2025 too as he managed to qualify fifth and ninth in the first two races of the year, whilst also coming undone on strategy when it came to converting them.
It’s clear that Tsunoda, nor the names above, are the problem at Red Bull and that their issues are related to the car. Two of the names are Grand Prix winners, whilst the other two have very respectable reputations.
Thus, drivers should not be judged based on that second seat, which appears to demand an elite, era-defining talent, to be able to handle despite Horner putting pressure on Tsunoda.
