Yuki Tsunoda has revealed that he “cancelled everything” following the Mexico City Grand Prix after his clash with Oscar Piastri squandered a “possible” fifth-place finish.
Having started at the back due to exceeding his power unit parts allocation, Tsunoda had taken advantage of an early stop and a red flag stoppage to be running up in eighth.
He was then contesting seventh with Piastri when the pair touched at Turn 2 on Lap 48 before colliding on the very next lap at Turn 1 as Tsunoda tried a move around the outside.
The Japanese racer was pitched into a spin which dropped him down the order to 16th, where he could only recover to 12th. Meanwhile, team-mate Daniel Ricciardo managed to secure a seventh-place finish.
Tsunoda admitted that the lost points were “hard to digest”, resulting in him electing to stay in his room ahead of travelling to Brazil for this weekend’s Sao Paulo Grand Prix.
“I was really frustrated after the race because I lost the opportunity to score points, the team also. I was having a good race until then so it was really massively frustrating and hard to digest,” he rued.
“Normally, Mexico you can enjoy around here, but I actually cancelled everything and just stayed in the room.”
While he initially defended his attempted overtaking manoeuvre on Sunday evening, he concedes that he should have managed the situation better from a points position.
“I think that the move that I did was not bad because I was closing the gap with DRS and it was easy to be alongside of him. The manoeuvre that I did, I tried to be close to Piastri and the move I did was not the thing I should have done while driving in that position,” he acknowledged.
“If I’m driving in P12, I can give slightly more pressure to him while overtaking to try and overtake at once. When I was driving in P8, in the end if I still couldn’t overtake P8 is not that bad from P19 or whatever, so I think more like situation management was not really right so that’s the main thing that I should definitely concentrate on for the future.”
Yuki Tsunoda (JPN) AlphaTauri AT04. 29.10.2023. Formula 1 World Championship, Rd 20, Mexican Grand Prix, Mexico City, Mexico, Race Day.
Tsunoda believes that he could have risen as high as fifth without the costly incident, citing Lando Norris’ progress as confirmation of the result he could have achieved.
He added: “There were big moments and it is a lost opportunity, not like P8 or P9, it was more like P5 because I was ahead of Lando.
“Our team and McLaren were having similar pace and P5 was definitely possible because I had new Hard tyres but yeah.”
AlphaTauri enjoying its strongest showing of the season in Mexico, leaving Tsunoda optimistic that the Faenza squad can maintain its recent momentum at Interlagos.
With AlphaTauri overhauling Haas and Alfa Romeo for eighth place in the Constructors’ standings, Tsunoda now has his sights on closing the 12-point deficit to Williams.
Asked about AlphaTauri’s prospects in Brazil, Tsunoda said: “I think it will be good, hopefully. It won’t be a disaster here for our car based on what our engineers are saying.
“Hopefully it will be a good race week and we can score points again. To close the gap to Williams is not easy, we are still 10 points behind but if we consistently take points then that will be possible so, points will be the main focus. Even in small amounts if we can score one point in the Sprint that will be great.”
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