Tsunoda faces 'insane' Racing Bulls return at Zandvoort with just one hour to learn new car

Yuki Tsunoda will make a surprise return to Formula 1 at Zandvoort’s Dutch Grand Prix after a reshuffle across the Red Bull family, stepping into the Racing Bulls seat vacated by Liam Lawson, who moves up to Red Bull to replace the injured Isack Hadjar. The Japanese driver has not started a grand prix in eight and a half months and has never driven the team’s 2026-specification car.

Hadjar sustained a wrist injury that ruled him out of the Dutch Grand Prix weekend, prompting the cascade of changes. Lawson shifts across to Red Bull, while Tsunoda — serving as reserve driver — fills the Racing Bulls seat at short notice.

The scale of the task facing Tsunoda has been underlined by F1 TV analysts Jolyon Palmer and Alex Brundle. Palmer pointed out that every other driver on the grid had the benefit of three pre-season tests to understand the new-generation machinery, with its radically different energy management demands and driving styles. Tsunoda will have just one hour of practice to get up to speed before sprint qualifying on Friday afternoon.

“The mental side of it is going to be insane for him,” Palmer said during the F1 TV Weekend Warm-Up show. “He’s driven some TPC, so that’s old cars, but he hasn’t driven this one. And they are so different compared to the last car that he’d raced. So to figure that out and then head into a sprint — you’re at Zandvoort where you’ve got walls and gravel traps lining the circuit. It’s really, really a big test. So if he gets near the points, I will be impressed with Yuki.”

Brundle echoed those concerns, highlighting the physical demands of a circuit that offers little margin for error. “I hope Yuki Tsunoda’s been keeping it up in the gym because it’s eight and a half months since he last started a grand prix and this is not an easy track physically,” he said. “It’s going to be a tough weekend to get your head around the systems and also the physicality of these cars.”

The sprint format compounds the difficulty significantly. On a conventional race weekend, drivers benefit from three practice sessions to build familiarity; here, Tsunoda must compress that entire learning process into 60 minutes before being thrown straight into competitive action on one of the most unforgiving circuits on the calendar.