Yuki Tsunoda's race-pace breakthrough at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix can be traced back to a decision he made to abandon his summer holiday and instead help Red Bull out of a hole.
As the rest of Formula 1 got in holiday mode after the Hungarian GP back in August, Tsunoda felt that it was not the right time to down tools given his squad's torrid weekend at the Hungaroring that ended with Tsunoda 17th and Max Verstappen ninth.
He told boss Laurent Mekies on the Sunday evening that he was cancelling his flight home to Japan for his summer holiday.
Instead, he was going to travel back to the UK so he could jump in Red Bull's simulator and try to work out with team members what was going wrong and how they could fix it.
The work he did that week helped deliver some answers and left Tsunoda convinced that the only way to both improve the RB21 and overcome his struggles with the car's handling quirks was to knuckle down and keep working.
The ball was set rolling on Tsunoda asking for extra sim sessions and it was in one of these, after the Italian GP, that he unlocked something that helped transform his feel in the car for last weekend.
As he told The Race about his first real-world experience of the change in practice in Baku: "I never had this kind of pace. Everything now makes sense more in terms of the degradation I'm having."
While Tsunoda has endured some tough times on track since joining Red Bull Racing, from the perspective of the team his work ethic has never been in question.
As Mekies reflected last week, having known Tsunoda from the Racing Bulls days: "He's listening and it's good. I'm very happy for him. He's working very hard.
"He has never backed off working hard. After the tough, tough time in Budapest, he came straight to the simulator instead of going on his holiday.
"Every weekend when he's not racing, he's working somewhere with his engineers or on his driving. I'm very happy for him that he's shown progress."
The Baku breakthrough
The result of all that hard work manifested itself in major fashion in Baku as Tsunoda unleashed what he said was a "massive" improvement.
What exactly he has changed he will not say, and the team is keeping tight-lipped too, but there is little doubt that it has made a difference.
As he told The Race: "Something I changed on the car seems to be working really well, and obviously there is some fine-tuning with my driving as well that I've worked quite hard to improve.
"I wanted to find the reason why I was so much behind [before], and I tried multiple sim sessions. Then I found something, and when I applied it to this track it seems to be working very well."
Whatever the breakthrough was, it helped Tsunoda go on the attack from sixth on the grid in Azerbaijan with what Mekies described as some "very serious race pace".
And although he could not quite overcut Liam Lawson for fifth, and potentially set about trying to attack the podium battlers beyond, the fact he was able to hold Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton at bay did not get lost on his bosses.
Tsunoda is still not yet at the point where he can follow in the wheel tracks of Verstappen, but the signs of progress are there and he is in a totally different place to the past.
As Mekies said: "I think it's his best race with us. He was strong in qualifying, he was very strong in the race.
"He was sometimes two, sometimes three, but rarely four tenths [of a second] away from Max. And Max was pulling away from everyone with that pace."
The 2026 driver call
With Mekies having said at the Italian GP that Tsunoda's hopes of keeping his place at Red Bull for 2026 rested on producing better race pace, the Japanese driver's performance in Baku offered hope that he can show his boss what he is capable of.
Red Bull had talked of wanting to get some "clean samples" of races where Tsunoda's full potential was on display - and Baku was the best display he has been able to give so far.
And despite the frustrations at the end of being trapped in a DRS train, after coming out of the pits on cold tyres and being passed by the flying Lawson, there was plenty of clean air running before the stops.
Mekies said: "It is not only his best result but also best race pace with us, and it was really the one that was probably most important for us, to get that clean sample that we said last time."
Tsunoda is well aware though that while the team was happy with his performance in Baku, it still wants to see more.
Furthermore, he will not be naive enough to ignore the fact that he finished behind Lawson - the driver who he is effectively in a head-to-head with over just one likely spot in the Red Bull F1 family next year.
Picking between them is really hard right now, and the driver call situation is also more complicated by Isack Hadjar - favourite to take Tsunoda's Red Bull seat for 2026 - having had a challenging time in Baku too.
With Formula 2 racer Arvid Lindblad believed to be Red Bull's preferred option for one Racing Bulls seat, the most likely scenario is that Lawson and Tsunoda are fighting over the other.
For Mekies, the complexity of Red Bull's 2026 line-up merry go round has upsides if it's making its drivers raise their games.
"It's good news for us. That is what we wish - that our drivers perform," he said.
"It is good news to see Yuki picking it up, he deserves it. It is why you see us relaxed about it.
"We have time. So why would we rush? With drivers, speed doesn't disappear. Drivers make progress, and it's such a confidence business.
"You see the confidence of Yuki this weekend was certainly high up and he performed very, very, very strongly.
"So we have more time. We will not wait until Abu Dhabi, but we have a few more races for sure [before deciding]."
Tsunoda knows there is no substitute for hard work as that decision looms.
