Yuki Tsunoda (file photo, 2025 season). Photo: Liauzu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Yuki Tsunoda hasn’t turned a competitive lap in a Formula 1 race since the 2025 season finale in Abu Dhabi. He’s still on Red Bull’s books, just not in the car. Isack Hadjar has the second seat alongside Max Verstappen this year, and Tsunoda’s actual job title at Oracle Red Bull Racing is now reserve driver: simulator hours, media duty, and staying sharp for a call that may never come.
Red Bull doesn’t usually let its academy graduates simply walk away, even once the results dry up. The organization has spent a decade building a marketing and driver-pipeline ecosystem around whoever is wearing the bull on their helmet, which is obvious in how carefully the team manages moments like Zandvoort’s Delft Blue helmet livery. Parking Tsunoda in a reserve role rather than releasing him outright keeps him inside that ecosystem, preserves his value on the open market, and gives Red Bull an insurance policy if Hadjar struggles.
That’s the confirmed part. The unconfirmed part, and the reason this is even a conversation this week, is a suggestion circulating in the paddock that Tsunoda could be headed for IndyCar. No team has been named. No contract talks have been verified. Nobody with actual signing authority on the IndyCar side has said a word about it publicly. Until that changes, this belongs filed under speculation, not signing.
It’s worth noting why the rumor has legs regardless. IndyCar’s 2027 driver market is already unusually fluid. Arrow McLaren has moved on from Christian Lundgaard to make room for Scott Dixon and Felix Rosenqvist, which leaves a genuinely quick driver hunting for a new home at the same time Formula 1’s own rosters are shuffling earlier than usual, a dynamic we broke down in our look at Williams and the wider 2027 grid scramble. A driver market that’s already moving is exactly the environment where a name like Tsunoda’s gets floated, confirmed or not.
None of this would be unprecedented. Takuma Sato spent parts of several seasons at Super Aguri and then Scuderia Toro Rosso, Red Bull’s junior operation before it became AlphaTauri and later Racing Bulls, before jumping to IndyCar in 2010. He went on to win the Indianapolis 500 twice, a feat no Red Bull-affiliated junior product since has come close to matching. More recently, Marcus Ericsson’s climb from a middling Formula 1 career into a title-contending run in IndyCar is a reminder that a driver’s ceiling in one series doesn’t have to match his ceiling in the other.
Mechanically, the jump is bigger than it looks from the outside. IndyCar’s spec Dallara chassis narrows the aerodynamic gap between cars far more than anything in Formula 1’s technical regulations, which shifts the value of a driver toward raw racecraft, and specifically toward oval experience Tsunoda simply doesn’t have. Every rookie has to complete IndyCar’s oval orientation program before qualifying for events like the Indianapolis 500, and ovals reward a different sense of car placement than anything on a street or road course. On the plus side, Tsunoda’s entire F1 career has been spent around Honda power units, and Honda remains one of only two engine suppliers on the IndyCar grid. That’s not a reason to sign him, but it’s one less variable to sort out if a Honda-aligned team came calling.
There’s a business angle here too. Reserve-driver retainers pay a fraction of a race seat, and Red Bull’s junior contracts typically carry option and buyout language that would need to be untangled before Tsunoda could commit to another series. If an IndyCar team is genuinely interested, it likely needs to negotiate some kind of release with Milton Keynes rather than simply signing him as a free agent, which is one more reason to treat this week’s chatter with a raised eyebrow until someone with actual signing authority puts a name on the record. It’s the same skepticism worth applying to how quickly teams like Hendrick Motorsports plan multiple seasons ahead for a single seat, just applied across the Atlantic instead of across NASCAR’s garage.
For now, the honest answer is that Tsunoda’s next race seat is unconfirmed in either direction. What’s confirmed is that Red Bull is still paying him to be ready, IndyCar’s 2027 grid has real vacancies opening up, and the sport has a track record of quietly rewarding F1 rejects who land with the right team. Whether Tsunoda becomes the next data point in that pattern, or this month’s rumor that quietly evaporates once the next silly-season story shows up, is worth watching. Just don’t bet real money on it yet.
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