08/09/2022
NEWS STORY
Yuki Tsunoda has hit out at those who accused him, and Red Bull strategist Hannah Schmitz, of conspiring to aid Max Verstappen at Zandvoort by causing the safety car to be deployed.
Such was the level of abuse aimed at the driver and Ms Schmitz, AlphaTauri subsequently took to social media to denounce the accusations.
"I don't want to know and don't care," said Tsunoda at today's press conference when asked if he understood why some fans were suspicious of last week's incident.
"I want to ask how does your brain create, how your brain looks like, scan you in an MRI and see what's wrong because it's funny how they create the story," he added. "It's as simple as that.
"Red Bull and AlphaTauri are completely different teams," he continued, "it's not as completely separate as other teams, but it's a different name, we're in Italy, they are in the UK, we perform in a different field.
"It is just a super simple fact that there was an issue with the car and we confirmed there was a differential issue," he explained. "Of course, the situation made it a bit confused but there's no room to complain to the team, myself and especially to Red Bull with such a crazy, crazy story.
"I was also running in a good place to score points," he pointed out, "so there's not any reason to just help them."
Referring to his communications with the team, he admitted: "There was a bit of an issue for my side and I can definitely learn from that, because I said to the team first that I felt the tyre was not fitted. I heard from the team that they first investigated the tyre not fitting and they fully focused on that and were not looking at other stuff.
"So I should in the future say that there's something going on in the rear part rather than a specific place that I'm not even clear on.
"The team is definitely listening to my radio and did a 100% effort to find the solution but it was not the ideal procedure as a team. Also, the team accepted that there was definitely a way to find the solution better and faster."
The Japanese driver, who takes a ten-place grid drop this weekend after incurring another reprimand, for driving back to the pits with his seatbelts unfastened, said that (team boss) Franz Tost would never sacrifice an AlphaTauri result for the big team.