Patrese: Tsunoda cannot make a difference for Red Bull

After firing Sergio Perez last year, the team briefly turned to Liam Lawson before discarding him to the ever-growing Red Bull driver scrapheap. They then banked everything on Tsunoda, who had once declared that in equal machinery, he could beat Verstappen.

How wrong he proved to be. The Japanese driver has been unable to come close to matching the Dutch ace, and is now fighting for his very future in Formula 1. It is abundantly clear he is not the solution to Red Bull’s long-standing second driver crisis, which has already claimed a string of Verstappen’s teammates.

Carlos Sainz was overlooked when Max was promoted (wisely, it turned out to be) from Toro Rosso to Red Bull. Thereafter, Daniel Ricciardo chose to flee the fight as it increasingly became Team Verstappen. Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon were crushed in 2019. Perez was slowly destroyed for the next four years, Lawson never stood a chance, and now Tsunoda has joined the trail of victims.

Against this backdrop, Grand Prix winner and motorsport veteran Riccardo Patrese shared his views on Tsunoda’s plight and what it means to be teammates with all-time greats like Verstappen and Michael Schumacher.

Patrese is blunt in his assessment of Tsunoda’s prospects: “Tsunoda is in Formula 1, but he cannot make a difference. Many years ago it was up to you as a driver to make decisions. Now you go in the car, they explain a lot of things to you, and then at the end you can drive a Formula 1 car.

"But to make a difference is another story. No problem, Yuki can stay in Formula 1 for many years. But at the end, if they are there or not, it’s not a big drama," reckoned the 71-year-old Italian.

Patrese knows firsthand what it means to sit opposite a superstar in the same garage. “When you have a driver like Schumacher in the team or Verstappen in the team, it’s real pressure because you know that they are super quick. You need to have the same attitude as them.

"When I was with Michael, I was nearly 40. It was approximately the same situation as Ferrari is in now with Lewis. Coming from a fantastic period as I had with Williams, I knew that I couldn’t go for the championship that year. I was really concentrating on trying to raise the level of the team with my experience.”

Patrese explained that his role at Benetton in 1993 was about development rather than personal glory: “In the second part of ’93, the car improved because I never spoke about the problems we had with the car. I was working closely with the team inside the team.

"I think the car improved without me whinging about the car. I stayed silent. The problem was Briatore was not doing a good PR job. My relationship with Schumacher was that I had pressure because he was very, very quick. In that period of my career, after 17 years of Formula 1, I needed the same opportunity I had the year before to be at my best.”

For Patrese, the timing of that comparison mattered most: “If I had really to compare my speed with Michael to see if I was as good as him, I would have had to race him when I was 22 or 23. In 1993 I saw that the car had problems.

"Because of that I concentrated more to work to improve the car than worry much about the speed of Schumacher. I could see that he was difficult to match. You need good morale as well as speed. If morale is down, so is speed," explained Patrese.