Red Bull hailed Yuki Tsunoda's adjustment to a major mid-weekend upgrade as "superb", only for poor team communication to undermine his best qualifying result yet and extend his point-less run further.
Tsunoda had warned Red Bull that the track was almost dry late in the first stint of the Belgian Grand Prix, and as he approached the final chicane at Spa it seemed he radioed a one-word query: “Box?”
The reply did not take long, but it took long enough. “Box, box,” he was told in the middle of the corner. “What the f**k?!” Tsunoda yelled, having already passed the pit entry. “I told you it’s dry!”
Tsunoda knew the miscommunication - which Red Bull rightly took responsibility for after the race - would carry a big price.
Delaying the switch from intermediates to slicks cost him a huge amount of time and changed his race. It dropped him from seventh out of the points and he has now gone six grands prix and a sprint race without scoring for Red Bull.
That run has been on Tsunoda until now. This time the blame is on Red Bull’s shoulders. The team was ready to pit - it just seemed to forget to tell its second driver.
By comparison, Max Verstappen got a crystal clear message well before the final corner: “OK, box, Max, box, box this lap”, and then a follow-up for good measure: “[Charles] Leclerc is also boxing - box this lap.”
Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies held his hands up: “It was our mistake.
"We wanted to pit him on the same lap as Max. And everything was ready, the crew was out, everything was ready to get both cars. And we simply called him too late.
“So it's on us, unfortunately. And one lap made a big difference today. So he lost, I think, three or four positions, which ultimately stopped his fight for the points.”
Tsunoda can probably be given the benefit of the doubt for spending the rest of the event tucked under Pierre Gasly’s ‘rear wing’ – which was more of a tea tray, such was the extremity of the Alpine’s low-downforce set-up – on a weekend when drag levels were decisive on whether cars could overtake in the dry.
He should not have been in that position. He should have been clear to run his own race and, more likely than not, score points. Eighth was realistic, and would have been his best Red Bull finish.
As frustrated as he was for that not to materialise, the good news is Tsunoda seems to have finally moved on from his run of struggling badly since the double whammy of his Imola Q1 crash left him both short on confidence and behind on car specification.
At Spa, in addition to qualifying seventh, he was closer to Verstappen - within four tenths - than any team-mate has been at the famous Belgian circuit since Daniel Ricciardo in 2018. It’s the kind of flourish that Red Bull needs to see from Tsunoda but it must happen more often, and actually be converted into a result.
On the evidence of Spa, that should come soon enough now that Tsunoda is on the same floor specification as Verstappen as of the middle of the Belgium weekend.
Mekies tried to play this down after the race at Spa, and said it was not a case of Tsunoda - still missing some parts but much less than before - suddenly being given the closer car equality he was previously being denied.
“As much as we got a lot of publicity for it, it's nothing unusual or nothing different here,” Mekies insisted.
“You push very, very hard to get the latest specification as soon as you can at the race track. You get it for one car, then you get it for the second car, and it's based on when are the parts coming, when is your next sample of that part coming, and sometimes you have a surprise because one comes in earlier, one comes in later.
“So as soon as it became available, we were then faced with a choice to either wait for the following weekend, or to use that slightly unusual window between sprint and main quali - which comes with some risk because it was extremely tight to be able to fit the parts to the car.
“The crew did an amazing job, and as you have seen we were actually slightly late going out for qualifying. Then you normally pay a price because the driver needs to adapt and it's not very nice to go into quali with a new-specification car.
“But we felt it was worth the risk and the effort, and Yuki did an amazing job with it to adapt through qualifying to it. He certainly did a big step and a very, very strong quali.
"It's certainly a superb job he has done to adapt and to extract performance in these conditions.”
Mekies was clearly trying to point out that the team hasn't just suddenly starting to help Tsunoda because of the team boss cahnge. There was a precedent for that kind of upgrade choice in the Christian Horner era, as the same thing happened just as few races ago in Canada, where Tsunoda was given a new floor from Friday into Saturday.
And Tsunoda had also been very happy already with the support Horner and Red Bull had given him. But he has a better, more personal relationship with Mekies, which could well play in his favour over the next few months.
However, to circle back to the point-less run, Mekies can only buy Tsunoda so much time. And while the primary problem in Belgium was undoubtedly the pitstop communication, Red Bull will have some concerns of its own.
Tsunoda’s pace did not look stunning in the grand prix despite having the best qualifying result of his Red Bull career so far.
He was holding on OK in the first stint, but even in clear air trying to make up time after the pitstop error his pace was not strong. He rejoined 3.9s behind Gasly and was within DRS range in six laps. But he’d lost a second a lap to Verstappen in that time, and Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko has noted that Tsunoda struggled for pace.
So there are still question marks over the extent of his breakthrough, because while there has undeniably been progress, it has mainly come in qualifying.
That is a little curious, as historically at Red Bull it has happened in reverse - team-mates really struggled versus Verstappen over one lap, but on high fuel, with the car more settled, the gap comes down.
Tsunoda’s done well to show more flashes of one-lap pace, but his compromised race pace and concerns over “melting” tyres - as he has put it several times this year - still linger.
There was a hope that the new floor he was given mid-weekend at Spa, after really struggling in the sprint, would mean compound gains over a race distance, too. But the way the race played out in Belgium rendered that an irrelevant data point - so Tsunoda will be tested this weekend in Hungary.
It is important that Tsunoda repeats his strong qualifying result at the Hungaroring, not least because track position is so important at this race. He is in obvious need of a good result - because flashes of promise are helpful but will not secure his future long-term.
And whether Red Bull ends up wanting to pair Verstappen with another new team-mate, which would almost certainly be Isack Hadjar if it went within its own driver pool, depends on what happens with Tsunoda.
It’s currently in everybody’s interest to make things work. And under Mekies, Tsunoda will almost certainly get every opportunity to improve and to prove himself.
It’s up to him to take advantage of it - as long as Red Bull’s also sharper than it was at Spa.
