Tsunoda doesn't care about criticism: "I was surprised to be honest"

Yuki Tsunoda is in his second season in Formula 1 and is making a case for a third year with AlphaTauri, with it still unclear which two drivers will compete for the team in 2023.

Tsunoda is on a shaky second season, struggling to put up consistent results while trying to control his emotions. In doing so, he is being guided by a sports psychologist. Something that might help is the fact that he pays less attention to the comments people make on social media.

That certainly helped him in the aftermath of the Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort, when Tsunoda was met with a wave of accusations because his elimination did suit race winner Max Verstappen. The AlphaTauri driver no longer cares much about such comments. "It's funny," he says simply.

"I was surprised to be honest, how people reacted to it. It was just a very simple thing that there was a car issue. And the engineers at first didn’t recognise the issue in the data, that’s why we restarted," the Japanese driver explained to Give Me Sport. "Then we found the issue in the data and that’s why we stopped. Simple as that."

Tsunoda thinks that people simply love to make drama, but does feel that people sometimes get quite carried away with it. He experiences this as somewhat frustrating, but he is determined not to be affected by it and therefore does not read the online comments.