It began with promise. Yuki Tsunoda lined up a surprising seventh on the grid for the 2025 Belgian Grand Prix, a result that turned a few heads and raised a few eyebrows across the paddock. But as is so often the case in Formula 1, dreams are one thing and execution is quite another. By the time the chequered flag fell at Spa-Francorchamps, Tsunoda’s race had unravelled into a tale of lost positions, radio chaos and strategic own goals.
His finishing position? Outside the points. Again. For the sixth race weekend in a row. And if you ask Yuki, this one wasn’t on him. Communication breakdown at the worst possible time.
The drama of Tsunoda’s afternoon centred around a moment that many casual viewers might have missed but every strategist dreads: the dreaded late pit call. Tsunoda, still running solidly in seventh, was barreling down the finish straight when his race engineer finally piped up with the words every driver knows mean business: “Box, box.”
The problem? He was already halfway to Liege.
“I was just accelerating past the pit entry when they called me in,” a visibly annoyed Tsunoda explained post-race. “I couldn’t believe it. I just said, ‘What the hell?’”
That particular radio message may not go down in F1 folklore quite like Kimi Räikkönen’s greatest hits, but it did capture the sheer frustration of the moment. Because with that split-second delay, Tsunoda was sentenced to one more lap on intermediate tyres that had long since outlived their usefulness. On the longest track on the calendar, that delay was fatal.
A dry track and a wet strategy
Tsunoda’s own words during the fateful lap offered a hint of what was coming. Over the radio, he noted that the track was “almost dry,” and his engineer responded with a lukewarm “we’re monitoring the slick times.”
That kind of tactical indecisiveness might fly at Monaco where overtaking is impossible and chaos reigns supreme, but at Spa, where strategy is often the race-defining factor, it was a recipe for disaster.
By the time Tsunoda did make it into the pit lane on the following lap, his race had already gone sideways. Once comfortably in the points, he emerged back onto the track in twelfth place. The top ten? Gone. His chance at a much-needed morale boost? Up in the thick Ardennes mist.
Whose fault was it, anyway?
To his credit, Tsunoda didn’t point fingers. Not directly, anyway.
“I thought it was dry, yes, but obviously I can’t make that decision myself. That’s what the team is for. We’ll analyse it after,” he said, adopting the usual post-race poker face that Formula 1 drivers are trained to maintain. But behind the scenes, the atmosphere in the Red Bull junior squad’s garage was already tinged with regret.
Red Bull Racing’s new team principal Laurent Mekies, parachuted in after the departure of Christian Horner, wasn’t about to pass the buck.
“It was our mistake,” Mekies confessed. “We had everything prepared to bring Yuki in on the same lap as Max, the crew was out and ready for both cars, but we just called him too late. That’s entirely on us.”
And that, in a nutshell, was that. No conspiracy. No mechanical failure. No tyre delamination or power unit gremlins. Just one badly timed radio call, one missed entry and one lap too many on the wrong rubber.
The lap that broke the race
On paper, it doesn’t seem like much. What’s a single lap in a 44-lap race? But Spa is no ordinary track. That one extra tour of the seven-kilometre circuit was enough for four or five cars to leapfrog the RB machine in the pits. And once you’re outside the top ten in a dry Belgian Grand Prix with the likes of Pierre Gasly and Nico Hülkenberg ahead of you, you need more than just horsepower and determination to claw your way back.
Instead, Tsunoda found himself stuck in a now-familiar nightmare: stuck behind Gasly’s Alpine, unable to overtake, unable to escape. Even with DRS at his disposal from lap 20 onwards, the straight-line speed of the VCARB simply wasn’t there.
“I tried everything,” Tsunoda admitted, “but I just didn’t have the top speed. I gave it everything I had, but once the tyres started going off, there was nothing left.”
A slow fade to irrelevance
The slow, painful drift backward through the field wasn’t immediate. But it was inevitable. Lap after lap behind Gasly ate through his tyres and sapped any remaining hope. By the time the final few laps rolled around, his grip had all but evaporated.
Haas driver Oliver Bearman caught and passed him for eleventh. Then, just to rub salt into the wound, Nico Hülkenberg’s Sauber breezed past to demote him to thirteenth. It was a quiet end to a race that had once promised so much.
The jury might wonder, what exactly does Tsunoda have to do to catch a break? Since his impressive early season form, which briefly saw him touted as a dark horse for a Red Bull seat, the wheels have well and truly come off. Literally, on some weekends.
He now finds himself marooned in the no-man’s-land of Formula 1 limbo. Not bad enough to warrant immediate sacking, not good enough to seriously trouble the top ten. And with Daniel Ricciardo no longer in the other car to make him look quick by comparison, Tsunoda’s stock is on a worrying downward trajectory.
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An apology with no points
Laurent Mekies may have owned up to the mistake, but apologies do not appear in the constructors’ standings. Tsunoda and VCARB leave Belgium with zero points and more questions than answers.
What could have been a morale-boosting finish in seventh or eighth turned into a footnote, another case study in how not to manage pit stop communication. In a sport where split-second decisions mean everything, VCARB was caught snoozing.
And Yuki? Well, he’s getting used to disappointment. But Spa hurt a little more than usual.
Was Tsunoda robbed by his team, or was this just another chapter in a driver not quite able to deliver when it counts? Let us know your verdict in the comments below.
Published by The Judge. #TJ13 🧑⚖️🏁
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Spa Francorchamps is a classic old school Formula One circuit, despite it being neutered from its original nine mile layout which was last raced in in 1979. Such was the fearsome reputation of the track which wended its way through the Ardennes Forrest, that drivers started to refuse to race there, forcing a number of racing categories to find an alternative venue.
In 1969, the F1 drivers agreed to boycott the Belgium Grand Prix due to the extreme danger of the circuit. There were ten racing fatalities in the 1960’s including five in the previous two visits. Safety measures including improved crash barriers were implemented and F1 returned the following year.
The final year before the circuit was slashed to just 4.3 miles, only the Formula One racing series had dared to visit the circuit and so for commercial reasons it was decided to abandon a large part of the layout which was particularly high risk…. READ MORE
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