Alan Permane has praised Yuki Tsunoda, after a year working with him at RB F1. The performance director has been impressed by the Japanese driver’s abilities throughout the year, and is seeing where he can improve to make him a very complete driver.
“I think he’s very good. He’s still improving and I think he realizes that.” Permanente said. “He knows the things he needs to work on and he continually works on them.”
“But his pace, we saw in Brazil in the wet, it was phenomenal, and just as decent in the race. He didn’t make any mistakes or anything like that in a very tricky race. “
“In Vegas, we started with a car that was far from perfect in FP1, we had a new rear suspension and we certainly weren’t at the top, but we got there and he had a very good qualifying. decent race to qualify seventh, and, once again, he had a good race with no mistakes.”
“I like Yuki a lot. I like him even more now that I work with him and know him a little more than I did from the outside. He did some very decent races. There’s definitely doubts the points he needs to improve.”
“You know, he had a big crash in qualifying in Hungary, on his way to a super time. He had a big crash again in Mexico, on his way to a super result. He so there are areas he needs to work on, but the speed is there, without a doubt.”
Permane wants to finish Tsunoda’s preparation so he can go to Red Bull Racing, because he thinks he has the potential. And according to the engineer, the driver could be recruited into the Red Bull first team even after 2025, if he is not there next year.
“I think it’s up to us to continue to work with him and work on it. I told him yesterday that there was a lot of talk about him and the Red Bull headquarters, and that was his goal. “That’s absolutely his goal.”
“I told him that nothing would make me more proud if that happened and I had a little bit of a hand in it. You know, it fits our goals. They are very compatible. Our goal right now is to finish sixth in the championship and to be as strong as possible, all of this is perfectly compatible with what Yuki wants to do.”
“If it doesn’t happen this year, that doesn’t mean it’s over. It just means we need to have a perfect year next year, so he’ll be on Christian’s radar [Horner] et de Helmut [Marko] to take him there. But his goals and ours are really the same.”
