Yuki Tsunoda explained the extent of the braking issue which plagued the second half of his Monaco Grand Prix and his view of the heated radio exchange that took place between himself and the team.
The AlphaTauri driver sunk down the order on the Intermediate tyre as the rain persisted, allowing both McLaren drivers of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri to pass to demote him out of the points before falling further down the order.
Under the wet conditions during the second half of the race Tsunoda’s race engineers gave him instructions to pick up the pace over the radio as his gap to Norris diminished.
The AlphaTauri driver snapped back over the radio shouting, “I know but this brake sucks!”
Tsunoda’s engineer persisted with his demand but the Japanese racer was refusing to have any of it, responding: “Are you trying to crash me or what?”
The issues with his brakes culminated in a trip into the run-off area at Mirabeau before getting running again, with Tsunoda explaining the extent of the issue after the race.
“The rain was OK, just [the] brakes, nothing harder than that,” he said
“I had a brake issue and I couldn’t push at all. The pace was really, really poor. It was really tough.”
“I mean, because of pushing… I think the team said to push the brake more because the temperature would come up and the brake would be in the normal range.
“Of course I would push if the brake was in normal shape. I pushed it and see how it goes, and immediately I went into the wall.”
Tsunoda was running comfortably in the points in P9 before the brake issue took hold and the incident meant that this is the first grand prix of the season so far where he has finished behind rookie team-mate Nyck de Vries.
“[I’m] so disappointed,” he added. “I can’t describe it with words, but until the middle of the race it was such a good car, such good pace, everything went well.
“So it’s hard to accept what’s happened in the end.”
Discussion about this post