Stronger Yuki Tsunoda showed why Red Bull won't rush F1 driver decision

Red Bull F1 team boss Laurent Mekies says Yuki Tsunoda's encouraging progress in Baku shows why the team is in no rush to finalise its 2026 driver line-up.

Tsunoda qualified and finished sixth in the streets of Baku, his best result for the team so far as the Japanese driver obtained Red Bull's latest floor specification.

And while both on Saturday and Sunday Tsunoda still languished some way behind his pacesetting team-mate Max Verstappen, the weekend presented the "clean sample size" that Red Bull finally wanted to see from its second driver as it weighs up its choices for its four-car driver line-up in 2026 across Red Bull and Racing Bulls.

Racing Bulls rookie Isack Hadjar still looks set to be promoted to the main team, but a final call won't be made before the end of October.

"It's good news to see Yuki keeping up," Mekies said. "He deserves it, it's why you see us relaxed about it, because we have time. Why would we rush? Because speed doesn't disappear, drivers make progress.

"It's such a confidence business and you see the confidence of Yuki was certainly high up. And he did very, very, strongly.

"So we have more time. As we said, we will not wait until Abu Dhabi, but we have a few more races for sure."

Photo by: Ozan Kose / AFP via Getty Images

Alongside an up-to-date Red Bull, key to Tsunoda's breakthrough was additional simulator work the 25-year-old took on with his engineering group in the Milton Keynes factory.

"He's working very hard. He has never backed off," Mekies added. "I mean, we discussed after it was a tough time in Budapest, he came straight to the simulator instead of going on holiday, he said: 'No, no, I'll go back to the simulator with the team and work the next day'.

"And that's the approach he has. Every weekend when he's not racing, he's working somewhere with his engineers or on his driving. And I'm very happy for him that he shows progress.

"I think it's his best race with us this year. The one thing that was probably the most important for us is to get that clean sample, as we said last time. I think he was listening and it's good."