Tsunoda shows more signs of progress against trio of team mates in 2023 · RaceFans

Yuki Tsunoda’s progress at AlphaTauri hasn’t always been easy to pick out, partly because the team has produced successively less competitive cars since his 2021 debut, and then due to the parade of different team mates he had this year.

He began the season alongside newcomer Nyck de Vries, but as soon as Red Bull had a sniff of getting Daniel Ricciardo back in a car, the writing was on the wall for the Formula E champion. He hadn’t shown up well against Tsunoda, and made matters worse for himself with a few unnecessary collisions, but nonetheless ushering him out the door before the halfway point in the season looked hasty by Red Bull, particularly when compared to Tsunoda’s similarly rough start two years earlier.

Tsunoda might have been happy for de Vries to see the season out, such was the superiority he enjoyed. What he did not need was a hugely experienced race-winner turning up in the team’s other car and out-qualifying him at the first time of asking.

However, to Tsunoda’s credit, this was not entirely the shape of things to come. By the end of his seven-race spell as Ricciardo’s team mate, he had narrowly won the qualifying duel, the clincher coming at Yas Marina. Tsunoda has pulled off strong results there in the past and the same was true again this year as he battled to eighth place which was not quite enough to clinch seventh in the points for AlphaTauri, but might have been with a sharper strategy.

But Ricciardo arguably produced the best performance of any of the team’s four drivers this year, claiming fourth on the grid in Mexico. It did not escape the notice of anyone that he split the Red Bull drivers, including the under-pressure Sergio Perez at his home race. Ricciardo brought the car home seventh, but was on course for a better finish before being scuppered by a late red flag.

Ricciardo should have been Tsunoda’s team mate for the majority of the season, but the broken metacarpal he sustained at Zandvoort put paid to that. It handed a precious opportunity to Liam Lawson, who had been overlooked for promotion from Formula 2 the year before, but gave a good account of himself in Japanese Super Formula this year.

Lawson and Tsunoda had been team mates before in junior categories, and at times their cars seemed magnetically attracted to each other with destructive consequences. Fortunately there was no repeat of that this year, despite Lawson putting up an impressive…