Red Bull have finally announced their driver line up for both F1 teams and its bad news for Yuki Tsunoda who will drop to the role of test and reserve driver for the Racing Bulls and Red Bull.

As was widely expected, Isack Hadjar has been promoted alongside Max Verstappen in the Red Bull car, while Liams Lawson retains his place and alongside him will be Dr. Helmut Marko’s ‘next Max Verstappen’ – Arvid Lindblad of British-Swedish nationality.

Tsunoda can consider himself a victim of circumstances given he was initially slated to race for the Racing Bulls this season and his preseason preparation was in the VCARB-02 car.

 

 

 

Tsunoda treated poorly by Red Bull

He was then propelled alongside Verstappen at the third round of the year in Japan, his home race. But the Japanese driver has struggled to adapt to a very tricky RB21 and has scored the fewest points of any driver who has raced alongside the world champion.

Yet there have been mitigating circumstances which have hampered Yuki’s progress. As Red Bull scrambled to improve their ill handling car, it was Max Verstappen who would receive the upgrades first. Tsunoda would only be afforded the new parts sometimes two race weekends later.

Since the big floor upgrade in Monza, Yuki’s result have improved marginally with him even out qualifying his team mate in the recent Sprint in Qatar. Yet Dr. Marko has had his heart set on promoting Lindblad since the summer, with a Red Bull source saying today “this has been set in stone for months.”

Yet the huge question is whether Lindblad is ready for the huge step into Formula One given his single seater experience is minimal. Arvid was racing karts as few as just three years ago, and his single seater racing has been limited to F4 – the cars the F1 academy girls drive – before this year when he was catapulted straight into F2.

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Linblad’s scant experience

Linblad started the year well after failing to score in Melbourne, he was in the points across the next ten races, claiming a Sprint win and a P2 podium before claiming victory in the feature race at theSpanish grand prix weekend. Yet since then his form has deserted him and he failed to finish in the points in ten of the next fourteen races.

Dr. Marko is known for his brutal honesty when it comes to young drivers whether in the Red Bull academy or elsewhere. He described Gabriel Bortoleto earlier this year as a “B” driver who only one twice in his F2 championship winning season.

Stepping into F1 from any other racing category is a massive leap for even the most talented of drivers. There’s a big jump in the physicality of racing behind the wheel of an F1 car, with drivers often experiencing forces in excess of 5 times their body weight.

The complexity of the modern Formula One cars is unrivalled. There are no driver aids such as traction control or anti lock brakes and rookies must master the complex hybrid power units, something they’ve never encountered before.

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The highly complex modern F1 cars

Steering wheels are intricate and with hundreds of different settings which are used to manipulate the handling of the car by adjusting the brake balance, engine mapping and energy deployment all while driving at over 200mph.

Next year, the new breed of F1 cars will be the most complex ever. The driver will control active aerodynamics much more complex than the current DRS together with managing the enormous increase in electrical power which will need strategising from lap to lap.

No other team other than the Red Bull owned Racing Bull’s are blooding rookies in 2026, and even many of the current drivers are struggling to adapt to the new requirements for driving the cars. Lindblad is set to join F1 as it enters its most complex era, and meanwhile he will be asked to drive as fast as possible and expected to collect points for the team.

Surely promoting the young British-Swedish d=river in 2026 is pure madness, yet that’s something Dr. Marko would dismiss in an instant. “If they’re quick enough, they’re good enough” he once famously said, but this may not be the case next season.

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Sainz claims 2026 cars require huge mental capacity

Following his first session in the Williams simulated car for 2026, 31 year old Carlos Sainz could’t emphasise enough how much work there was to do. “Very complicated,” he began. “It occupies a lot of brain space while you’re driving,” said the Williams driver.

He did concede that drivers will adapt as they did when the hybrid era began. “If you ask Lewis [Hamilton], [he] was in the big regulation change between 2013 and 2014, going from a normal V8 to a complex V6 with battery management and all these things.”

“At the time, it was a shock how much the driver had to think about things that before on the V8 we would never think about. But then we all get used to it, we all adopt it and now it feels normal,” reflected the Spaniard.

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Williams boss says 2026 cars “very very difficult” to drive

Of course in 2014, Lewis Hamilton was not a rookie driver having claimed his first world championship in 2008 he was in his eight campaign.

Williams boss James Vowles gave his opinion on the challenge facing the drivers in 2026. “We’ve got a lot more work to do to refine it, and we’ve got to make it easier on the driver because I think the workload is actually very, very difficult for the drivers at the moment, which I think is another comment they’ve spoken about.”

In recent weeks there appeared to have been a mood music change in the Red Bull camp, with team boss Laurent Mekies speaking highly of Tsunoda’s efforts for the team. Dr. Marko had stopped the propaganda wave in favour of Lindblad he’d been preaching all summer and so today’s announcement has come as something of a huge surprise.

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Marko’s madness or the next Max Verstappen?

Given the opportunity to step into an F1 car is a chance any young driver will snatch with both hands, yet questions over Lindblad’s readiness are fair comment given his lack of experience and the F2 results he has delivered this year.

Kimi Antonelli was said to have been afforded some 10,000 kilometres of testing in a 2023 Mercedes car under the FIA’s TPC regulations. No amount of previous car testing will help Lindblad given the revolutionary nature of the 2026 cars. Surely the experience of Yuki Tsunoda would have been a better selection given he has four years of experience and can give detailed driver feedback to the Racing Bulls engineers.

Has Marko’s madness taken a turn for the worse, and in his desperation to find the eventual replacement for Max Verstappen will he ruin another racing drivers career by rushing him into F1 before he is ready???

 

 

 

Which car does the Yas Marina circuit favour. RB21 v MCL39

As the current generation of ground effect Formula One cars comes to a close, there is one race weekend remaining at the Abu Dhabi Yas Marina Circuit. The drivers’ title race remains a three way contest following McLaren’s mighty mistake at the recent Qatar Grand Prix.

As Red Bull updated and fine tuned their RB21 since the summer break, the once all mighty McLaren MCL39 has been beaten by Max Verstappen in five of the last eight Grand Prix outings. McLaren by way of contrast stopped developing their 2025 car at the end of the European racing season in Monza, although they have brought some track specific revised components a handful of weekends.

Whilst the Verstappen charge back from 104 points behind the the leader Oscar Piastri was in full flow, McLaren team boss Andrea Stella insisted some of the reasons for his resurgence was track specific, at venues where the team did not expect their drivers to be dominant….. READ MORE