Canadian Grand Prix – Yuki Tsunoda (AlphaTauri), the embarrassing crash and F1 on slippery ground

The winner and his runner-up are seated in an armchair, in front of a screen broadcasting the highlights of the race in a loop, including Yuki Tsunoda’s astonishing crash that led to the safety car exit. †There’s a bump thereanalyzes Sainz. She scared me all weekend†Yes, I braked before, thinking there wasn’t much grip here‘, Verstappen agrees.

Although unusual, the incident did not provoke more reactions from the actors. And will remain anecdotal on the scale of the season. After all, pilots are people and to err is… human. Yet it is not entirely coincidental that Tsunoda was the author of this astonishing clumsiness.

The AlphaTauri driver has only a year and a half of experience and ended up in the elite after a fast climb – he went from F4 to F1 in three years – under pressure from Honda, for whom having a Japanese driver in the discipline was an important point matter.

In the slump of Japanese motorsport, Tsunoda was an exception: author of 4 poles and 3 victories in F2, 3rd in the championship in his first season, the driver born in 2000 also stood out for his ease of overtaking. Enough to convince parent company Red Bull to promote him to the B team, making some concessions to the exacting criteria that governed its strategy.

Because apart from a certain talent for the “pure race”, the pocket pilot had not much left in the royal sport. He willingly admitted that in his youth he was not passionate about running, struggled to control a very exaggerated character, and that his physical condition was much less adapted to the demands of an athlete than to those of a teenager: “I was playing PlayStation and then I was ordering foodhe said last year. Then I played PlayStation again. Then I would order food again†

All this forced Franz Tost, boss of the AlphaTauri team, to take drastic measures to accompany his pilot. So the Japanese, living in Great Britain, had to move to Italy, a few kilometers from the factory in Faenza. He still follows a particular trainer’s recommendations to keep his diet and physical shape in check. And also works on his impulsiveness, to reduce the number of birds waved on the radio, both in competition and in free practice.

Create uncertainty

Progress is underway. From now on, his engineer hears the anger of the Japanese less… since he no longer systematically presses the communication button. A year and a half after his arrival in F1, Tsunoda is still not a finished product. And that comes as no surprise to anyone.

This is F1 with Verstappen sauce where every manufacturer, after seeing the exploits of a precocious talent, tried to find the new wunderkind. Sometimes by forcing the passage. This is how the set, already invested by the sons of billionaires, agreed to no longer have the 20 fastest men in the world. But one day, pilots will probably be a part of it. Or not.