Former Ferrari team manager Peter Windsor has claimed that both Daniel Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda’s careers could be ‘gone’ if they fail to ‘blow the other away’ during their intra-team battle at Faenza. Both drivers have set their sights on Sergio Perez’s Red Bull seat come the end of the 2024 season.
Perez currently has one year left on his Red Bull contract and is expected to depart the team at the end of that deal, failing a considerable turnaround in his performances relative to team-mate Max Verstappen. The leading external candidate for his seat looked to be Lando Norris, but the Brit put pen to paper on a new, long-term deal with McLaren last week.
That move means that Tsunoda and Ricciardo are the two leading candidates to replace Checo, should Horner opt to make a change to his driver line-ups for 2025. However, with the Japanese starlet already three years into his F1 career and the latter’s already entering the twilight years, 2024 promises to be a make-or-break year for the pair.
Speaking to the Cameron F1 podcast about the situation at VCARB next season, Windsor said: “I’m interested in the Daniel Riccardo [and] Yuki Tsonoda square-off. This is effectively, if Yuki doesn’t blow Daniel away, I’d say his career’s probably gone, and equally if Daniel doesn’t blow Yuki away, his career’s probably gone. So there’s a lot riding on those two.
“I think that car will probably be quite good. Not because Christian Horner is playing a larger role with what’s it called? Visa Cash App whatever. He’s bridging towards that other team a little bit.
“But because there’s some good people at AlphaTauri, if we can still call them that, and there’s a lot of technology there that they should be getting. So you know, I can’t imagine that car’s going to be slow so that’s one thing I’m looking forward to seeing that squaring off between the two drivers there.”
The Faenza-based outfit are moving closer to sister team Red Bull in 2024 following a challenging 2023 campaign. Under their previous guise as AlphaTauri, the team finished eighth in the Constructors’ Championship standings but spent most of the year rooted to the bottom.
However, they ended the season strong with four points finishes in the final five rounds and this momentum is expected to carry over into 2024 as the recently rebranded VCARB team benefit from the closer technical partnership with reigning champions Red Bull.
