Tsunoda Never Had a Chance in Verstappen's Shadow

Red Bull gave Yuki Tsunoda a promotion and the worst strategy on the grid. This wasn't a teammate battle—it was a sacrifice.

Max Verstappen won in Las Vegas with one perfectly-timed pit stop. Yuki Tsunoda, in the same Red Bull, made three stops and finished 12th, a minute and a half behind. This wasn't a performance gap. This was a strategy execution so lopsided it looked like the team forgot Tsunoda was racing.

Key Finding

Verstappen ran one clean stint to the win. Tsunoda made three pit stops and still finished 87 seconds behind.

Key Finding

Verstappen ran one clean stint to the win. Tsunoda made three pit stops and still finished 87 seconds behind.

Start with the facts: Verstappen stopped once on lap 25, ran medium-to-hard, and controlled the race. Tsunoda stopped on lap one—before the race even settled—then again on lap 27, logging two stints on the hard tyre and bookending with mediums. Three stops in a race where the winner made one.

The spin on this will be that Tsunoda qualified P20 and had to recover, so of course he needed an aggressive strategy. Except that's not what happened. That first stop wasn't aggressive—it was reactive, panicked, and it killed any chance he had of salvaging points from the chaos.

The strategy that ended the race before it began

TSU vs VER — tyre strategy across 50 laps

Tsunoda's first stint lasted one lap. Verstappen stayed out for 25. That's the entire story in one visual.

TSU: M→H→M | VER: M→H

Key Finding

Verstappen ran one clean stint to the win. Tsunoda made three pit stops and still finished 87 seconds behind.

Look at Tsunoda's hard tyre stint—26 laps, laps 2 through 27. His average lap time was 99.39 seconds, and the degradation was minimal: just 0.27 seconds per lap. That's a tyre working beautifully. He was managing it, preserving it, staying clean.

Then they brought him in on lap 27 for mediums and sent him out to run another 23-lap stint to the flag. Why? Verstappen proved you could run the hard all the way home—his second stint went 25 laps with barely any drop-off. Tsunoda had tyre life left. Instead, Red Bull put him on a compound that would fade, in traffic, with no strategic upside.

Key Finding

Verstappen ran one clean stint to the win. Tsunoda made three pit stops and still finished 87 seconds behind.

The pace gap tells you everything you need to know about intent. Verstappen was 1.6 seconds per lap faster across the race. Not because Tsunoda was slow—his hard-tyre pace was solid—but because he spent the entire grand prix out of phase, stuck in DRS trains, managing tyres that didn't need two more pit stops.

Kimi Antonelli started P17, made one stop, and finished on the podium. Nico Hulkenberg started P11, made one stop, and took P7. Tsunoda started P20, made three, and gained eight places. That's not a rookie struggling in his first race with the senior team. That's a driver who never got the strategy to fight.

The gap that never closed

TSU vs VER — gap between them on every lap

Tsunoda was 15 seconds back at the start. By the flag, he was 87 seconds behind. The pit strategy locked him out from lap one.

TSU aheadVER ahead

Final gap: VER ahead by 87.0s.

Key Finding

Verstappen ran one clean stint to the win. Tsunoda made three pit stops and still finished 87 seconds behind.

Red Bull will point to the grid position and the early VSCs and say Tsunoda was always on the back foot. Fine. But they gave Verstappen a one-stop strategy that worked perfectly, and they gave Tsunoda a three-stop scramble that achieved nothing. Same car, same track, same race. One driver got to race. The other got managed into irrelevance.

Watch Qatar. If Tsunoda qualifies anywhere near the top ten and Red Bull still can't give him a strategy that lets him fight, this isn't bad luck. It's a pattern.

Nadia Ferreira

@@nadia_f_racing

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