Yuki Tsunoda has been impressed by the ‘significant’ year-on-year development of the RB Formula 1 team following a first points finish of 2024 at the Australian Grand Prix.
Tsunoda secured a second consecutive Q3 appearance of the season after qualifying eighth in Melbourne before picking up the team’s first points of the year on Sunday.
The 23-year-old maintained eighth across the line on Sunday, but he was promoted to seventh place amid a 20-second time penalty for Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso.
“The car felt good straight away from FP1,” Tsunoda said. “We knew that we just had to put it all together.
“In the race, it wasn’t easy actually. A couple teams picked up the pace quite a lot, but we were able to maximise the performance and opportunities so I’m very happy and the team did a fantastic job.”
Tsunoda’s strong performance from the get-go in Albert Park asserted his position as RB’s lead driver following continued struggles for eight-time race winner Daniel Ricciardo.
Ricciardo was unable to find the same performance from the VCARB 01 and found himself eliminated in Q1, and finishing Sunday’s race 12th.
The Australian was left bemused by his deficit to his team-mate on home soil, whereas Tsunoda continues to go from strength to strength behind the wheel of the team’s heavily redesigned challenger.
“Every race week, I’m just resetting myself,” said Tsunoda of his recent performances. “It’s a new race week, and at the same time, each track is performing a little bit differently, but actually our car is pretty consistent.
“I think the good thing is that we are pretty consistent in terms of performance that actually we didn’t have last year.
“We were kind of up and down last year, so that’s actually one of the strengths, but for myself, [I want to] just keep improving and try to fix the things I want to fix, and learn from previous races.
“We didn’t have any mistakes [in Australia], and this is very important for me and also for the team to have good confidence for upcoming races, and I think, especially after the new team [rebranding from AlphaTauri to RB], to have a clean race sounds easy, but it wasn’t easy for us. We are definitely improving race by race as a team significantly.”
Over the winter, the Faenza-based team underwent a major shakeup in team personnel, technical philosophy and nomenclature.
RB is now closer aligned with the lead Red Bull team, and began to inherit key components from the sister team in the latter stages of 2023.
The move has contributed to a stronger package at RB, with Tsunoda already noting that a significant step has been taken year-on-year.
“It’s just actually very impressive how our car is performing a lot differently compared to last year,” he said.
“Consistently, in a couple of corners, we are using a higher gear compared to last year’s car.
“We knew that last year’s off-season especially, we struggled a lot, so I think the team has done a significant job.
“I think the massive, massive work to improve ourselves, improve our car, the amount of upgrades we brought second half [of last year] was like almost every race, it’s definitely hard work that has paid off.”
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