‘Yuki Tsunoda has popped out the other side of tough rookie year’

AlphaTauri technical director Jody Egginton believes Yuki Tsunoda has weathered a tough rookie year and is becoming a stronger racer.

Tsunoda is midway through his second season with the AlphaTauri team, and is having a much stronger 2022 relative to team-mate Pierre Gasly, despite the AT03 being less competitive than last year’s offering.

With Gasly on 16 points after 11 races, Tsunoda has scored 11 points – his best result so far has been a seventh place at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.

While Tsunoda recently attracted fresh ire from Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko after a collision with Gasly at Silverstone, Egginton has praised the young Japanese driver for turning around his driving after a calamitous rookie year.

Tsunoda earned a reputation for being crash-prone during 2021, but the AlphaTauri technical director said the driver has come on in leaps and bounds since last year.

“He’s adapting to Formula 1 and, even though we’ve had a regulation change, the way he was driving the car evolved, even through last year,” Egginton said on the Beyond the Grid podcast.

“At the start of the year (2021), he had some good results out of the box. Everyone was like ‘Oh wow, Yuki is great’. But, like a lot of rookies when you do the analysis, they start well, and then they go through a bit of a purple patch.

“And he did, he went through a point where his confidence dipped, and he was questioning himself and questioning what he wanted to do with the car. And then he popped out the other side of that and, towards the end of last year, I think he’d understood how he wanted the car set up.

“His driving also evolved to give him a wider range of setups he could digest, and he’s just carried that form on really. I think the Yuki we’ve got now is easier to set a car for him than it was mid-season last year.”

Going into further detail about how the Tsunoda of mid-2022 differs to this time last year, Egginton said: “[We had] a combination [of him] not really being sure what he wanted, and the shunts and mistakes affecting his confidence – he went through that patch, but he’s come out the other side of that.

“He’s much more able to say now what he wants from the car, and I think that’s a good thing.

“That’s a milestone with any rookie, I’ve seen with drivers before where they go through patches where they’ve got the talent, but the races are not going their way, or they’re making silly mistakes, or they’re…