Unfiltered? Yes. Prone to emotional outbursts? Absolutely. Lazy training-dodger? Well, not so much. If you think you know everything about Yuki Tsunoda, prepare to be surprised…
WORDS OLEG KARPOV PICTURES PETER FOX, RED BULL CONTENT POOL AND YUKI TSUNODA/INSTAGRAM
A group of people armed with guns, standing shoulder to shoulder, are finding themselves being charged at by zombies.
“I don’t want to do this!” screams one of them. “I don’t want to do this!”
The footage, from inside one of London’s virtual reality game rooms, is enshrined on the phone of performance coach Michael Italiano. And the screaming voice belongs to a Formula 1 driver he works with, Yuki Tsunoda.
“Yuki hasn’t spent much time in London,” the Australian, formerly the trainer of his childhood friend Daniel Ricciardo, tells GP Racing. “And I’ve been living in London for six years so, when he got there, he was like, ‘Show me something I haven’t done yet’.
“And I knew he loves shooters! So I picked the scariest zombie game. But before we put our equipment on, I could see he looked really nervous. I’m like, ‘Are you okay, mate?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t like zombies!’ And I was like, ‘Look, you’ll be fine’. And he goes, ‘No, no, no, can we change this?’ And I’m like, ‘No, it’s too late, right? We are in here, we’re doing it’.
“So, right at the start, when the first zombie comes at us, he’s screaming! He’s like, ‘I just want to back out’. But then he loved it – he didn’t want to take the goggles off! And at the end, you get the stats – and he actually won, he got the most kills. So he had the bragging rights. But at the start, he was being a little wuss, it was quite funny.”
The coach as driver-whisperer
“Of course I won. I cannot lose to him!” Tsunoda laughs, corroborating Italiano’s description of events. “Yeah, I don’t like the zombies and all this kind of scary stuff. I can’t even watch horror movies alone. So, OK, I was a bit scared at first, but then got used to it, and actually enjoyed it a lot. You sort of feel like being in a movie or something, shooting zombies, which is cool. And in the end I won. So I’m happy.”
This was all part of the getting-to-know-you process at the start of the year, when Italiano took over from Yuki’s former trainer Noel Carroll, who had decided to step off the F1 merry-go-round. Italiano had become available just at the right time, thanks to Ricciardo (now, by coincidence, Tsunoda’s neighbour in the AlphaTauri garage until his recent injury) becoming Red Bull’s reserve driver and n
