Yuki Tsunoda believes the atmosphere within Scuderia AlphaTauri remains good despite a poor start to the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season and an outburst from Team Principal Franz Tost.
Tost was heavily critical of his engineers and design team having been told that the AT04 was a much better car than it’s AT03 from 2022 only for the performance to be well adrift of what they were hoping for.
Tsunoda has scored AlphaTauri’s only point by finishing tenth in the Australian Grand Prix, whilst team-mate Nyck de Vries has yet to break into the top ten, his best finishes coming in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia where he finished fourteenth.
And despite the underwhelming start to the season and the relatively poor performances, Tsunoda says everyone remains positive and they are all working towards the same goal in improving their place on the grid across the remainder of the season, starting with the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
“Inside the team obviously, we’re not happy about performance, but at least we are staying always positive,” said Tsunoda to Motorsport.com.
“We’re quite happy with what we’ve done on the track side, we’ve almost extracted 100% of the performance from the car, which is the most important. And we’re clear on what direction we have to take for the development side as well.
“As a track engineering side, we just focus to give all of the 100% effort to make a car better and as a development side in Faenza they know what they have to do.
“As a team it’s good that we’re facing the same direction, so I’m still feeling positive. We always aim for the points. I don’t feel any negative energy from the team.”