Yuki Tsunoda Blames AlphaTauri’s 2023 Brake Problems on Previous Season’s Issues

Yuki Tsunoda believes the brake problems AlphaTauri F1 Team is experiencing in 2023 carry over from a similar blunder suffered by team-mate Pierre Gasly last season. At last month’s Monaco Grand Prix, Yuki Tsunoda was in 9th position with 20 laps to go and was in a position to score points. kept dropping.

In the end, Yuki Tsunoda finished 15th, while teammate Nick de Vries finished 12th. Yuki Tsunoda struggled noticeably with his brakes, complained over the team radio and went off the track at Mirabeau after struggling with temperature control. Brakes were also highlighted at last weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix due to excessive dust generated under high load. Asked by Autosport for clarification, Yuki Tsunoda said the problem of exaggerated ‘efficiency’ in wet conditions has been a longstanding problem at AlphaTauri and has also plagued Gasly, who is currently at Alpine, in 2022. “The brake problem is probably from last year. It happened more often to Pierre than to me, but this season I have more,” he said. “Literally, braking efficiency. You just don’t feel the heat, you just don’t feel the efficiency, you can’t push as much in rainy conditions.Obviously the tires get colder and things get worse and worse.” We had a problem from FP1, which also affected our qualifying performance.” “It’s a bit disappointing that we have to do a little more unnecessary build-up than our rivals just to warm up the brakes.” Yutaka Tsunoda Tsuyoshi said that the problem was not a calibration problem, but rather a hardware problem with the brake material, which would affect the vehicle regardless of his driving style. “We’re putting more emphasis on the engineering side” to find a fix to get out of the brake-heavy deceleration, he said. Tsunoda finished 12th after receiving a 5-second penalty for driving Guanyu Zhou off the track in Barcelona, ​​but the team said that the double-header with Monaco has improved his brakes. “We changed the braking approach a bit to have a more aggressive temperature setting, but this time we really had to manage the braking a bit,” commented Yuki Tsunoda. “In fact, the efficiency was much better than in Monaco, so it was much better,” he said. “I think the team did a good job and I’m pretty happy with it.