Yuki Tsunoda said he didn’t feel especially disappointed when Red Bull dropped him at the end of last season.

Red Bull promoted him to their top team at the third round of last season but chose not to extend his contract for 2026.

“When I got told, I still remember, I didn’t feel that much of a huge disappointment or devastated feeling,” Tsunoda told the official F1 channel. “Obviously I was still disappointed and pretty sad that I’m not driving next year, but it’s not like I didn’t expect it.”

Tsunoda said the pressure had been so intense over the second half of last year “I was never able to kind of breathe out much.” Red Bull told him at the penultimate round in Qatar he would be replaced at the end of the year.

While his team mate Max Verstappen went into the final round of the season with a chance to win the world championship, Tsunoda had the largest ever points deficit to a team mate in F1 history. Despite that, he said he could not have tried harder to improve his performance.

“I fought really hard,” he said. “I fought more than ever in that 2025 year. And even if I look back now, I don’t have much regret.

“I gave everything and the outcome is something I didn’t like, obviously, what I heard in Qatar. But honestly, I just gave it everything and okay, if that’s the outcome, yes, I have to accept it.

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“It was something that I had to think about in the coming weeks or coming time. But still there was the Abu Dhabi race and still Max was fighting for the championship so my focus was still in Abu Dhabi to make the team happy and help Max as much as possible.”

Despite spending almost the entire season with the team, Tsunoda said he still didn’t understand Red Bull’s RB21 at the end of the year.

“Normally I’m able to understand the car, what I’m driving, what kind of characteristics, obviously [by the] end of the year,” he said.

“But it feels like even after Abu Dhabi I didn’t know what kind of car I was driving. I still don’t understand what was the issue and what kind of things made me struggle to learn about this car and get used to the car.

“I thought the confidence was there, but some races I just somehow lost confidence. I still don’t understand about the car, to be honest.”

Tsunoda said his efforts to emulate Verstappen’s approach to driving Red Bull’s car were not successful.

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“One thing about myself, I think if I say completely honestly, is I have a big enough ego to not change my driving style,” he said. “I know what I’m doing in terms of driving and I believe in myself.

“So I never try to change my driving to other drivers even though that driver is competitive and fast. Obviously for Max, it’s a different case, he’s a world champion, he’s proved a lot of things.

“I still learned a lot of things from his driving, so still my core driving is the same, and then sometimes probably [that was the] first year out of any years since I started that I thought about changing my driving style and trying to do something similar to Max.

“But in my perspective, if I just look at data, I didn’t really see a huge difference in terms of driving. What I did most, and what I think now is the biggest mistake last year, was to try to replicate the set-up of what he’s doing.”

Tsunoda found Verstappen’s set-ups tended to exaggerate the handling traits he was already experiencing.

“Even though knowing that sometimes if I felt the car was very oversteery, Max’s car in theory made the car worse – more sensitive in the direction change or made the car slide more – I tended to choose that set-up, even though I was already struggling with this oversteer.

“It could happen sometimes the opposite way as well, even though I was struggling with understeer, and his car was more understeery, I tried to kind of replicate that.”

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