Red Bull has confirmed what the paddock had assumed for weeks: Yuki Tsunoda will not be on the 2026 Formula 1 grid. The Japanese driver will be replaced at Red Bull by Isaac Hadjar, and with Liam Lawson retained at sister team Racing Bulls alongside rookie Arvid Lindblad, there is no longer a seat available anywhere in the Red Bull structure for Tsunoda.
It is the end of a year that began with an unexpected promotion and ended with an unforgiving scoreboard.
Tsunoda never had ideal preparation for the Red Bull opportunity. Just three races into 2025, he was handed the seat he had been rejected for only months earlier, after Lawson's brief Red Bull chance went badly. He had to rebound from the disappointment of being overlooked for the Sergio Perez replacement — watching Lawson line up alongside Max Verstappen in what was supposed to be the punishment posting of the paddock — and he had to do it almost overnight.
For a while it looked like the turnaround was going to hold. Tsunoda reported being fitter and in a better mental place than he had been in years. He was reasonably quick in qualifying early on, scored points in his opening races, and by the end of his first four Grand Prix weekends was already delivering more consistency than Lawson had in his Red Bull cameo. By the standards of Verstappen's recent teammates — and that is the only yardstick that matters at Red Bull — Tsunoda was more or less at the level of late-season Perez from 2024.
And then Imola happened.
In qualifying for the May race, Red Bull had changed Tsunoda's car specification for Q1, fitting the latest floor and bodywork. Tsunoda attacked the first flying lap as though the setup was identical to what he had driven in practice. At the second chicane the front end bit more aggressively than expected, the rear broke loose, and the car went into the barriers. It was a silly error, avoidable, and — the detail that matters most — it destroyed any early momentum he had built.
The damage was not only psychological. The supply of the new specification parts was scarce. The crash meant Tsunoda would be running behind Verstappen on upgrades for stretches of the season, which in turn made Red Bull hesitant to trust him with the next spec in case of a repeat. The gap to his teammate — already significant, because every Verstappen teammate's gap to Verstappen has been significant — widened into a canyon.
The numbers tell the story without adornment. Tsunoda beat Verstappen in just one qualifying session all year, the Qatar sprint. He never looked like beating him across a full Grand Prix weekend. The occasional good laps were real, but the average deficit was not survivable at a team whose second seat exists, first and foremost, to support its champion's title campaign.
There were flashes. In individual race weekends he looked more credible than either Lawson or late-season Perez. His camp clung to those sessions, knowing the context around car specification had often been against him. But at Red Bull, context does not keep you in the car. Points relative to Verstappen do.
Hadjar gets the seat. Lawson stays at Racing Bulls. Tsunoda, a Honda protege whose career has always been intertwined with Red Bull's engine partnership, leaves the grid entirely. It is a harsh outcome for a driver who, at times this season, looked genuinely capable. It is also, on the numbers, not a surprising one.
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*Originally published on [NewsFormula One](https://newsformula.one/article/yuki-tsunoda-2026-f1-grid-exit-imola-crash-red-bull-replaced-hadjar). Visit for full coverage.*
