Japan GP: Red Bull’s controversial driver swap, Lando Norris vs Oscar Piastri, track conditions and more burning questions at Suzuka
After two long weeks, F1 is back in action at the Japanese Grand Prix to kick off the first of three triple-headers in the 2025 season.
With multiple race winners, dramatic disqualifications, and a controversial driver swap coming out of the first two rounds, the F1 circus now heads to the iconic Suzuka Circuit for the ultimate driving test on Sunday, April 6.
Sports News Blitz’s F1 writer Henry Eccles looks at five big questions that every F1 fan ought to be asking in the build-up to what many drivers regard as their favourite race on the calendar.
How will Yuki Tsunoda and Liam Lawson fare after Red Bull’s driver swap?
Red Bull have done it again.
Yet another one of Max Verstappen’s teammates has been axed, but this time in a more brutal fashion than any driver departures in the past.
After just two race weekends into the 2025 season, in which he qualified at the back of the grid at both Australia and China, Liam Lawson has been demoted back to Racing Bulls.
Replacing him is Yuki Tsunoda, unlucky not to have been promoted from Red Bull’s sister team after outperforming both Lawson and Daniel Ricciardo throughout an impressive 2024 campaign.
At Suzuka, all eyes will be on Tsunoda, making his Red Bull debut at his home Grand Prix, knowing he has to provide an immediate uptick in performance for his team.
One thing that the Japanese driver certainly does not lack is confidence, and when speaking to the media for the first time since the switch at Honda’s headquarters, he refused to shy away from the pressure.
“When I first got the call, I thought: 'Wow, this is going to be interesting,'" Tsunoda said.
"I don’t want to raise expectations too much, but for this Japanese Grand Prix, I want to finish on the podium. That said, I know it won’t be easy right from the start.
“My priority is to first understand the car, how it behaves compared to the VCARB. If I can naturally enjoy driving it as I get familiar with it in FP1, then the results will follow.”
But in a car as imbalanced as Red Bull’s RB21, many fans are worried that Tsunoda will meet the same fate as Lawson, who struggled to get to grips with a machine so heavily engineered to favour Verstappen.
At the Honda event, however, Tsunoda revealed that he has spent two days working on the 2025 car’s simulator and that he did not find it to be ‘that challenging to drive.’
“I definitely got the impression that the front end is very responsive, as people often say. But if you ask whether it felt tricky to handle, I wouldn’t say it gave me a particularly strange feeling, at least in the simulator.”
As for Lawson, the Kiwi said in a statement that it was ‘tough’ to lose out on what was a ‘dream’ seat at Red Bull, but it would certainly not be a surprise to see him perform better in the sister car given the RB21’s very specific and difficult characteristics.
The 23-year-old has also been encouraged by senior advisor Helmut Marko to look at former Red Bull drivers Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon, who ‘recovered’ to become ‘highly regarded Formula 1 drivers’ after struggling as team-mates to Verstappen.
“We are not throwing him out of Formula 1,” Marko said. “He remains active within Red Bull and the Racing Bull is a good car.”
“I also believe that if Liam had not had so many technical problems and the car was more controllable, this would have worked.”
READ MORE: F1 news: Yuki Tsunoda to replace Liam Lawson at Red Bull from Japanese GP
What is happening with Carlos Sainz?
It has also been a tough start at a new team for Williams’ Carlos Sainz.
The Spaniard crashed under a first-lap safety car at the season-opener in Melbourne, and while he did score his first point for Williams in Shanghai, he crossed the line 13th on track and was helped out by the disqualifications to the two Ferrari drivers and Pierre Gasly.
Sainz was behind his team-mate Albon all weekend in Shanghai and admitted he has work to do to catch up.
"A lot of analysis needs to be done in the next few days because clearly I wasn't competitive, I wasn’t fast,” Sainz said after the Chinese Grand Prix.
“It's something that puzzles me because ever since I jumped into this car I've been really, really quick.
"It's not that it doesn't suit me. It's just that when you go and push a bit further, and you try to find lap time as the track ramps up and it grips up, whatever I seem to be doing doesn't seem to pay off in quali and I end up going slower rather than quicker."
Sainz’s comments echo his pre-season observations of feeling ‘a bit lost’ in terms of lap time and finding ‘where the last two tenths of the car are.’
It ought to be said, however, that things are still far from bleak for Sainz.
The 30-year-old was impressive during pre-season and at the beginning of the first weekend at Melbourne - it is surely just a case of adaptation and bringing it all together.
There would also be fewer question marks around Sainz’s performance this early on if it were not for the exceptional start to the season from his team-mate Albon.
The Thai driver has already scored 16 championship points this season after a P5 and P7 finish in Australia and China respectively, meaning he has already beaten the points tally he scored in the entirety of the 2024 season (12).
As Team Principal James Vowles says, it is good that ‘the world can see that Alex is absolutely brilliant’ but his early season form should also further encourage Sainz that Williams know what they are doing as a team, and that with time he can eventually compete.
Can Ferrari pull themselves together?
After pushing McLaren all the way to the final weekend of last year’s Constructors’ championship, many expected Ferrari to take the fight to their historic rivals from the start of the 2025 season - especially with the arrival of seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton.
But after a difficult first weekend in treacherous conditions in Australia and their first double disqualification in F1 history in China, Ferrari find themselves P5 in the standings, already 61 points behind leaders McLaren.
It is not all doom and gloom for the Scuderia, though. Hamilton’s dominance in securing pole position and then a maiden Sprint victory in Shanghai shows that Ferrari can compete at the front when they get it right.
Even in the Grand Prix on Sunday, 23 March, despite eventual disqualification, Charles Leclerc’s pace was impressive, given he had lost his front wing endplate during the first lap.
The Monegasque driver has admitted that while race pace does not appear to be a concern, qualifying is where Ferrari are ‘paying the price,’ and that striking the balance in the car setups for short and long runs is where work needs to be done.
More than anything at Suzuka, however, Ferrari will surely just be hoping for a solid, incident-free weekend to stop the points gap to McLaren from widening much further before bringing in upgrades at the following race in Bahrain.
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: Lewis Hamilton’s disqualification sparks FIA rule change debate and raises Ferrari concerns
Which McLaren driver will make a statement this weekend?
Things could hardly have started better for McLaren in 2025.
Following Lando Norris’ stellar win in the rain at Melbourne, team-mate Oscar Piastri responded with a cool and commanding victory of his own in Shanghai.
The double-header victories mean McLaren have started a season with consecutive race wins for the first time since 2003, when David Coulthard and Kimi Raikkonen won at Australia and Malaysia respectively.
The Woking team also added eight more points to their championship tally thanks to the Sprint race in China, meaning they sit comfortably at the top of the Constructors’ with 78 points.
Going into the season, it was said this year would be F1’s tightest championship battle in a long time, but McLaren’s early form looks ominous - even Red Bull-like at times.
With that, the focus has started to shift to the intra-team battle between Norris and Piastri, and with it being one race win apiece, the Japanese Grand Prix represents an opportunity for either driver to make a huge statement.
So far this season, though, Norris and Piastri have been kept apart in the races.
With both drivers sensing a title opportunity, could we see the first proper scrap between the pair in Japan?
If we do, it would be the biggest test yet to the team’s so-called ‘Papaya Rules,’ which essentially give the drivers the licence to race each other, but with the caveat of avoiding high-risk situations that would damage the team’s points score.
In Suzuka, the pair face what many regard as the ultimate driving challenge - the snaking ‘S’ curves, the unsettling Degner right-handers, and the fearsome 130R corner - making the prospect of a showdown between the McLaren duo all the more exciting.
And what about the conditions?
Weather has always been a factor for teams to consider at Suzuka, given that the race has historically been held towards the end of the season, just off the back of Japan’s typhoon season.
Since 2024, though, the race has been moved earlier to April, during the country’s world-famous cherry blossom season.
Despite the earlier start, there remains a good chance of rain this weekend, particularly closer to the Grand Prix on Sunday.
On Friday, April 4, the two practice sessions are unlikely to be affected by poor weather, with only a 2% chance of rain, a high of 16°C and 10 to 20 mph NW winds expected, according to Weather.com.
On Saturday, April 5, there will be cloudier conditions and a higher chance of rain at 9% during qualifying, but overnight, that increases to 70% before race day.
On the day of the Grand Prix, Sunday, April 6, the chance of rain is said to be at 60%, with morning showers expected before the race start at 2pm local time, while temperatures rise to 18°C with humidity at 64%.
UK fans can catch all of the action on Sky Sports F1 and Main Event, with Saturday’s qualifying set to start at 7am UK time, followed by the Grand Prix start at 6am on Sunday.
READ NEXT: F1 News: Biggest winners and losers from F1 2025 Chinese Grand Prix
