SINGAPORE GRAND PRIX 2025 | LONGEST STINT

 

YUKI TSUNODA: CHRISTIAN HORNER HINTS AT RED BULL EXIT AFTER 2025

Yuki Tsunoda will represent experience and continuity at Racing Bulls next year but, passed over for promotion, the Japanese looks to be running out of road at the Red Bull-owned Formula 1 team.

A flurry of Red Bull announcements culminated on Friday with 20-year-old Isack Hadjar confirmed as Tsunoda's teammate.

The Frenchman takes the seat vacated by New Zealander Liam Lawson, who joins four times champion Max Verstappen at the main team after Mexican Sergio Pérez was dropped.

Tsunoda, 24, will be starting his fifth year with the team previously known as AlphaTauri and RB and has close ties to Red Bull's engine partners Honda.

The Japanese manufacturer is leaving Red Bull at the end of 2025, however, to work with Aston Martin.

"We're acutely aware that if we're not able to provide an opportunity for Yuki [at Red Bull] in all honesty this year, does it [keeping him on] make sense?," Red Bull team boss Christian Horner told reporters.

"You can't have a driver in the support team for five years. You can't always be the bridesmaid. You've either got to let them go at that point or look at something different."

Horner said he had spoken with Tsunoda, a fan favourite currently enjoying time off in Japan, and the driver was determined to show what he could do.

"I think he's very determined. He knows that things change very quickly," the Briton said. "Who would have thought nine months ago that we'd be sitting here talking about Liam Lawson being our driver for 2025?

Yuki Tsunoda missed out on a drive with Red Bull in 2025. Mark Thompson/Getty Images

"Things change quickly in this industry and he's aware of that and he knows that he needs to be the one demonstrating that he's the one knocking on the door."

Italy-based Racing Bulls, who have had several name changes after Red Bull bought Minardi in 2005 and renamed them Toro Rosso, have always been a feeder for the title-winning main Milton Keynes team.

Drivers to have come through their ranks include four times world champions Sebastian Vettel and Verstappen as well as race winners Daniel Ricciardo, Pierre Gasly and Carlos Sainz.

Hadjar is one of a group of young prospects coming into the sport and Red Bull also have Arvid Lindblad as an exciting talent on the horizon.

Horner rates the 17-year-old, who has both British and Swedish nationality, particularly highly after a strong rookie season in Formula 3 including a Silverstone double win.

Currently without a super-licence, Lindblad will be seeking the necessary points in New Zealand early next year before a full F2 season that could set him up for promotion in 2026 at Tsunoda's expense.

- Reuters 

THE GRID | ITALIAN GP 2024

 

DANIEL RICCIARDO FIRES BACK AT JACQUES VILLENEUVE'S CRITICISM

Fifth is Daniel Ricciardo's best qualifying position so far this year. Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images

 MONTREAL, Canada -- After securing fifth on the grid for Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix, RB driver Daniel Ricciardo hit back at criticism levelled by 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve earlier this weekend.

Speaking on Sky Sports' TV, Villeneuve questioned why Ricciardo was still on the Formula One grid, he said: "I think his image has kept him in F1 more than his actual results."

The Australian's qualifying result in Canada -- just one day after Villeneuve's comments -- was his best of the year for a grand prix and his second best overall behind his fourth place grid slot for the sprint race in Miami.

Asked if he had sent a message to Villeneuve with his performance, he said: "I still don't know what he said. But I heard he's been talking s---. But he always does.

"I think he's hit his head a few too many times, I don't know if he plays ice hockey or something. But yeah. Anyway. I won't give him the time of day, but... all those people can suck it!

"I want to say more, but it's alright. We'll leave him behind."

Ricciardo's qualifying performance followed news earlier on Saturday that his teammate Yuki Tsunoda would remain at RB in 2025.

The Australian's own future is not yet clear, but he said being in Montreal, where he secured his first F1 victory in 2014, had helped him rediscover his form.

"I've obviously been highly motivated to do more than I have been this year," Ricciardo said.

"Obviously Miami was a bit of a one-off. I know how good those results feel, and that's why I do it, to feel those highs.

"I think just coming into the week, I don't know, everything felt right, I was really happy just to come back to this circuit and drive here, because I love it.

"Today is 10 years to the day of my first win, and that day changed my life. So there's a lot of nice emotions coming into it, and I felt like I was ready to do some good s---."

- Laurence Edmondson, F1 Editor

MERCEDES' RUSSELL TAKES SHOCK POLE OVER VERSTAPPEN AT CANADIAN GP

 

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

MONTREAL -- George Russell and Max Verstappen set identical times in qualifying for the Canadian Grand Prix, with Russell taking pole position by virtue of setting his time earlier in the session.

The Mercedes driver clocked a 1:12.000 on his first run in Q3, which was then matched down to a thousandth of a second by Verstappen in the final moments of qualifying.

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Formula One rules state that if identical times are set by multiple drivers, the one who set the time first will start ahead.

Lando Norris will start third on the grid for McLaren ahead of teammate Oscar Piastri in fourth after Norris was just 0.021 seconds off the times of Russell and Verstappen.

Russell's pole position marks Mercedes' first of the season after the team struggled with the performance of its car from the first race in Bahrain.

A new front wing for the Monaco Grand Prix helped address one of the main weaknesses of the car, and Russell attributed the pole position to the work done by Mercedes back at its factory.

Asked whether he could hold off championship leader Verstappen for victory on Sunday, he said: "Why not? Of course. Let's go for it. The car's been feeling so good since we brought an upgrade at Monaco."

Ferrari will not feature in the top 10 on the grid after both drivers failed to hook up a competitive time in the closing stages of Q2. Charles Leclerc missed out on a place in Q3 by 0.032s to qualify his Ferrari 11th, with teammate Carlos Sainz 0.037s further adrift in 12th.

Leclerc, who won the last race, in Monaco, and is second in the championship, immediately radioed his team after Q2 and said, "I guess we are out? OK, I won't comment here." Sainz added that he had "no grip" after returning to the pits and learning about his grid position.

Daniel Ricciardo will start fifth for RB on Sunday's grid, a welcome result for him after teammate Yuki Tsunoda was confirmed at the team for 2025 with Ricciardo's future still uncertain.

Aston Martin's Fernando Alonso will start sixth ahead of the second Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton. Hamilton and Russell had both set times in the 1:11s in Q2, which were the fastest of the qualifying hour, but Hamilton could manage only a 1:12.280 when it mattered in Q3.

Tsunoda will start eighth in the second RB ahead of the only Canadian on the grid, Lance Stroll, and Williams' Alex Albon in 10th.

Just 0.008s behind Sainz's Ferrari in 12th, Albon teammate Logan Sargeant secured his best qualifying position of the season in 13th, ahead of Kevin Magnussen's Haas in 14th and Pierre Gasly's Alpine in 15th.

For the second weekend in a row Sergio Pérez was knocked out of qualifying in Q1 and will start 16th on the grid. The Mexican driver, whose new two-year contract at Red Bull was confirmed earlier this week, was nearly a second off the lap time of teammate Verstappen in the opening session of qualifying.

A sprinkling of rain reduced grip levels at the start of Q1, but conditions improved rapidly as the track dried, meaning the pressure was on all drivers to improve in the closing stages. Valtteri Bottas qualified 17th for Sauber ahead of Alpine's Esteban Ocon, who will start last once his five-place penalty for clashing with teammate Gasly in Monaco is applied.

Haas driver Nico Hülkenberg qualified 19th and will move up to 18th as a result of Ocon's penalty, and Sauber's Zhou Guanyu will start 19th after qualifying 20th.

- Laurence Edmondson

DOES F1 NEED.TO CHANGE UP MONACO FORMAT AFTER DREARY RACE?

The growing size of F1 cars combined with the narrow streets of Monte Carlo made for a processional Monaco Grand Prix on Sunday. Peter Fox - Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

 MONACO -- The worst fears of Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso came true on Sunday as the Monaco Grand Prix produced the most processional race in Formula One history. For the first time since the championship started in 1950, the top 10 finished in the same position they started.

The feel-good story of Ferrari's Charles Leclerc finally winning his home race after years of heartbreak was a glorious end to what had otherwise been a dire event at the most famous race venue on this side of the Atlantic.

Emotions were contrasting. While Leclerc was fighting back tears of joy late in the race, championship leader Max Verstappen, uncharacteristically running down the order in sixth position, had been fighting back tears of a different kind.

"F--- me, this is so boring," he said in a radio message to the Red Bull pit wall in the opening stage of the race. "I should have brought my pillow!"

Ahead of the weekend, Verstappen's old title rival Hamilton had asked the media how they stayed awake watching the Monaco Grand Prix every year. That same day, Alonso had said Monaco was the standout F1 week of the year, until race day.

Hamilton and Alonso are in the camp of drivers who simultaneously agree that F1 would not be the same without the Monaco Grand Prix and that something might need to be done to improve the spectacle of the championship's most famous race.

Verstappen had his own suggestions of what needed to change by Sunday evening. The championship leader spent much of his race behind Hamilton's Mercedes teammate George Russell, both drivers operating well below the limit of their respective cars in a bid to get their tyres to the end of the race.

Russell's radio comms were equally damning about the race that was unfolding.

"At this stage, we gain nothing from driving fast," he told Mercedes with 68 laps still to run. Hardly something you expect to hear from someone competing in motor racing's pinnacle series.

The narrow, twisty streets of Monte Carlo and the ever-growing size of F1 cars have bolstered the race's reputation for monotonous races in recent years, but even by the standards of the Monaco Grand Prix, this one was horrendous in terms of quality. One extenuating circumstance turned the dullness dial up to 11.

World championship leader Max Verstappen, left, was stuck behind fifth-placed George Russell for the entirety of Sunday's Monaco Grand Prix. Joe Portlock - Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

The red flag on Lap 1, caused by a collision involving Sergio Pérez, Kevin Magnussen and Nico Hülkenberg, prompted the race to be suspended. Due to a quirk of F1's rules, teams could change tyres during the wait. This meant that when the race resumed more than a half hour later, every driver had made the one change of tyre compounds mandated in the rulebook and, in effect, could go to the end of the race without stopping again.

"It was a very static race," Red Bull boss Christian Horner said. "The top 10 is as it started. ... The red flag effectively killed the race, because everybody just was going to run to the end."

It wasn't just Russell and Verstappen who were driving slower than they could. A little further down the road, RB's Yuki Tsunoda was dropping even further back in eighth. Early on, three groups had formed: Leclerc and the chasing three behind him, then a group of Russell, Verstappen and Hamilton, then the rest behind Tsunoda.

Williams driver Alex Albon, who claimed his team's first points of the season in ninth, was the driver stuck directly behind the RB for the entire contest.

"It's annoying because he had pace, he had so much pace," Albon said about Tsunoda after the race. "I was like, we can all manage, I'm happy to manage. We don't need to manage this much. We were managing so much. I was like, 'Man, I could get out and drive my Vespa around here.'

"I mean, it was so slow. It was so painful. It's actually hard to stay focused when you're driving that slowly because you're just not even near anything. You're not near any limit. He absolutely cleared off at the end of the race, and I was like, 'You could have done this the whole time!'"

Asked whether the rule about changing tyres under a red flag needed to be looked at in the future, Albon said: "We need to figure [something] out. Or maybe if it's a Lap 1 red flag maybe have a mandatory pit stop or something.

"It worked in our favour, to be honest with you, so I'm not complaining about it, but that is part of it. The medium guys at the start of the race were just ... I do think they could have kept up with the pack on the first few laps."

The fact that the pace did pick up toward the end highlights another issue with Monaco. Verstappen was one of the few who made a pit stop, which he could do thanks to the huge gap Tsunoda had created, but after easily catching Russell with fresh tyres, he got stuck immediately again and did not even have a sniff at moving up to fifth position.

Russell and Verstappen have not always seen eye to eye, but they appeared to share a bonding moment over how little they had enjoyed the race, a topic of conversation that is likely to pick up traction in the 12 months until F1's next race in Monte Carlo.

The transcript of their interaction, captured while Verstappen was being interviewed by ViaPlay, went as follows:

Verstappen: I think George and I are going to go for a run now, because we didn't really have any exercise. My God! That was terrible. So boring! Yeah, anyway.

Russell: At least a bit more interesting at the end. I was scared we were going to lose the tyres by driving so slow.

Verstappen: It's OK. You can't pass, so ...

Russell: We need to do something. They need to change something for Sunday. Mandatory pit stops, I don't know.

Verstappen: Like five or something!

Russell: Yeah, five!

Interviewer: Refuelling?

Russell: Refuel, yeah. `

Verstappen: Mandatory nap! I don't know.

Russell: One lap on foot!

Interviewer: Toilet break?

Verstappen: I needed to go to the toilet, yeah. It was bad. I went, luckily, so it was all good!

While there was clearly a tongue-in-cheek element to some of the suggestions, the prospect of a format or circuit tweak for the next Monaco Grand Prix surely has to be considered after how the 2024 event unfolded. Horner suggested the prospect of improving Monaco's main event should be high on the agenda of F1's decision makers.

"It's something that we should collectively have a look at," he said. "It's not racing as such when you're just driving around three or four seconds off the pace because the other car hasn't got any chance of overtaking. Monaco is such a great place to come racing, but the cars are so big now that we just need to look at, 'Can we do something that introduces an overtaking area?' Or at least the potential of an overtake? Because the top 10 is exactly as it started on the grid and not a single overtake in the top 10."

F1 will have to consider any changes to Monaco carefully, though.

One statistic that went around social media in the hours after Leclerc's win: In the Formula E race around a slightly different version of the Monaco track earlier this year, there were more than 200 overtakes. That's evidence that F1's bigger cars are to blame, some said, while others said it is proof the circuit can be tweaked to accommodate better racing.

But Formula E's race at Monaco should provide a cautionary tale. It is nowhere near the world-famous event the F1 equivalent has become. Part of that will be down to the fact that Formula E is a new series without the history to match the Monaco Grand Prix, but there is another reason fans do not flock en masse to watch the all-electric cars around the streets of Monte Carlo: they just don't look very good. The cars do not inspire awe in the same way an F1 car does around the narrow streets and, in the process, the kind of mystique F1 can generate at different points of the weekend is not there.

There is a prevailing school of thought in some corners of the paddock that the sport can always have dull Sunday races at the Monaco Grand Prix so long as Saturday's qualifying event is standout. And, as noted ahead of the week, the spectacle of one flat-out lap in Monaco is still one of the greatest things you can see in modern Formula One.

"We keep the extra excitement for qualifying as everyone knows that's a really important session," Tsunoda said on Sunday night. "Probably more than a normal race, qualifying has more value and we ended up in the top 10. Obviously the race is hard to overtake and maybe less overtaking for the spectators or whatever, but I think this is Monaco, and this is why qualifying is extra special compared to other tracks."

Whether that is enough for everyone remains to be seen.

- Nate Saunders, General Editor, F1

MONACO GRAND PRIX FINISHED AS IT STARTED | TOP 10 AT 2024 MONACO GRAND PRIX

 

BREAKING: RICCIARDO & TSUNODA EXTEND CONTRACTS

 

2021 ALPHA TAURI HONDA AT02 | GASLY & TSUNODA TEST NEW F1 CAR AT IMOLA | アルファタウリ