Racing Bulls team principal Laurent Mekies insists Yuki Tsunoda has elevated all aspects of his performance this year, which has been the bedrock of his improvement on track.
It has also proved foundational in the advancement of his F1 career, having recently received the long-awaited call up to Red Bull – in part due to the struggles of Liam Lawson alongside Max Verstappen.
It is a move that Mekies believes the Japanese driver was already prepared for, arguing he is now operating on a “very serious level” after yet another step forward in 2025.
Speaking in the FIA press conference at Tsunoda’s home grand prix, the Frenchman described how the 24-year-old responded to initially being snubbed by Red Bull – and how he has progressed since.
“Yes, for sure he’s ready,” Mekies told media including RacingNews365. “We had these questions here many times in the past and we kept repeating that Yuki has made an incredible step last year compared to his previous seasons.
“We really felt that if he was going to make another step in 2025, we would be talking about a very serious level — and that’s exactly what he has done. So, credit to him.
“He also had the bad news at the end of last season. He went to Japan, he came back in very strong spirit. As soon as he joined us back in Faenza and in Milton Keynes in January, he worked extremely hard.
“The spirit was there, the attention to all the details was there. When he jumped in the car in Bahrain, he showed pretty much straight away to us that he had made another step.”
Improvement the whole way round
Mekies feels Tsunoda’s areas of improvement, as well as the rate of it, has been more expansive than is usually expected on a driver as they develop further into their career.
The 47-year-old detailed how the Japanese driver has subsequently converted that encompassing growth into results on track.
“You know, we often think that drivers only grow precisely from a maturity standpoint — in the calmness and in the analysis — but I think in Yuki’s case, we have seen him making steps 360 [degrees around]” he explained.
“We have seen him being more calm, being more mature, improving massively his technical feedback. Really quite an incredible step across the last 12 months, and this is converting to speed.
“As a result, the natural speed when he gets into the car is higher straight away. When you combine all that, well, you turn a young driver into a team leader, and that’s really the role he was taking into the team, certainly from the start of the season.
“So I think it was a very impressive example of improvement at 360 [degrees], and as we know, it never comes for free or with no effort. You can sense how much effort and concentration he’s been putting into that.”
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‘Faultless’ Tsunoda
When asked to expand further on his comments, Mekies pinpointed how Tsunoda has started turning in “faultless” weekends, especially at the start of the current campaign.
The opening two rounds could have yielded so much more for the driver and team had it not been for major strategic errors on Racing Bulls’ part in both Australia and Shanghai.
“He’s able to turn up to a race weekend and, from the first lap of FP1 to the last lap of the race, do just a purely faultless weekend,” he replied.
Lawson had been around six to seven-tenths of a second off Verstappen before the switch with Tsunoda and had failed to score points so far this term.
On the other hand, the 24-year-old was immediately within a tenth of a second to the Dutchman in FP1 at Suzuka.
“Of course, we are not fast enough for that to be visible to most of you guys, but we have seen him executing weekends, or qualifications, or races under serious pressure… Take Melbourne – he put the car in P5 there on the dry, I think it’s his best qualifying ever,” Mekies added.
“Take the Sprint Race in China – he finished P6 with huge pressure from faster cars behind him, didn’t put a foot wrong. So what you see outside of the car is certainly turning up into very tangible improvements when he’s driving the car.”
