Yuki Tsunoda always knew that he faced an uphill battle to get on top of Red Bull's tricky RB21 2025 Formula 1 car.
And, while having been initially confident that things would not be too bad when he first tried it out in the simulator, a reality check at the Japanese Grand Prix highlighted that it's going to be far from easy for him to get the most out of it.
But what has served as a bit more of a culture shock to Tsunoda is how getting embedded within the team, and working in a totally different engineering culture, has opened up headaches on top of what is going on with the car.
At Bahrain on Friday, for example, on a tricky day with hot temperatures punishing the tyres, he admitted that things had not been helped by some hiccups in how he dealt with his race engineer.
"There was a lot of miscommunication between our side of the garage, on the radio for example," said Tsunoda after ending FP2 down in 18th, 1.5 seconds off the pace.
"That's part of the learning process because it's still only the fifth session from when I jumped in. It was obviously not the finest session.
"We should make it much smoother on the operations side, the warm-up, the switches and everything. It was pretty messy overall.
"We just have to avoid this situation in future. But maybe me and Woody [Richard Wood, race engineer] have to go out tonight and build the relationship more."
Although Tsunoda has swapped race engineers in the past, that was all done within the same organisation that had its own set culture in place.
"With a new engineer, communication-wise it's a lot different to how I used to do it with VCARB [Racing Bulls]," he said.
"Even though I also switched to a new engineer at VCARB, he was already in the team from a couple of months before, so he knew how I was communicating with the engineer I used to have."
The unexpected Japan pitfall
Just how important the working processes are to the overall end result was highlighted in Japan, when Tsunoda's weekend took a turn for the worse in a scrappy Q2 session.
He had failed to get his tyres into the right operating window for his critical qualifying lap and then, as he tried to make up for them not being perfect, he overdrove and the laptime dropped away.
Reflecting on that, Tsunoda said the trigger for it all was having to deal with something that he "didn't expect": a totally new way of interacting with his engineering crew when it came to sorting out tyre preparation.
That is because at Racing Bulls the team had pretty much led his hand in telling him how best to get the tyres into the right operating window for a qualifying lap. The approach at Red Bull is totally different.
With a much bigger engineering crew, the process is far more two-way - where the team takes on board feedback from the drivers over the course of what they find out on track in practice to then work out together how best to attack things.
It requires a more involved approach from the driver - something that four-time world champion Max Verstappen is used to, but that Tsunoda needs time to learn.
"It's a completely different approach," he admitted. "If I say it in a simple way, VCARB is more telling us how to do it. Red Bull is more like they take the parameters from the outlaps that I do across the race weekends.
"I wouldn't say which is better. There are a couple of things where I feel like VCARB is doing an easier approach for the drivers, more than Red Bull. But Max has had that process for nine years so he's just able to do it.
"It's the same as me at VCARB. I just didn't have to think about it but now I probably have to.
"I need to dig into what kind of approach I should take to tyre warm-up. It's an ongoing process of how we can do better as a team to make it a little bit easier."
But the RB21's still a challenge
While getting up to speed with off-track processes is not the work of the moment, Tsunoda equally has admitted that the RB21 is a challenging beast to get a handle on.
His early confidence in the simulator that he could have tamed it, especially with a new set-up idea that he carried into the Japanese GP, has faded away as the reality of its through-corner balance issues bites.
What has made things particularly complicated beyond it being more difficult to drive is that making improvements so it feels better just makes the car slower.
This is something he experienced in FP2 in Japan when, having worked on a change of set-up direction to make it more benign, it backfired.
"I was able to make the car [have] a less sharp turn-in in FP2," he said. "It was more like how I felt in the VCARB.
"I was feeling quite comfortable in the car, and I thought, 'Oh, this is a really good direction'. But In terms of laptime, it went slower.
"Inside the car I felt, 'This laptime must at least be faster than FP1' because in FP1 I started with it a bit tricky at the rear and I felt like I had a lot more room to improve in terms of confidence in my driving.
"Then in FP2 obviously the driving quality was better, and I felt quite good in the car set-up and I actually went slower.
"So I just have to cope with a bit of trickiness because in terms of laptime, that trickiness is maybe providing a good laptime."
The situation has left Tsunoda taking off his hat off to team-mate Verstappen in being able to deal with it.
"The trickiness of the rear: it's great how he's able to cope with that kind of set-up."
