Yuki Tsunoda’s foul-mouthed radio messages have become somewhat of a regular occurance, although it’s something which has seen him attract a sizeable following.
Ever since the AlphaTauri driver was promoted from Formula 2 into Formula 1 in 2021, he’s often failed to keep his radio messages PG.
However, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has revealed the reasoning for this and where his shocking language actually came from.
Being part of the Red Bull Junior programme, Tsunoda spent time in England with the Milton Keynes-based team learning the English language.
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When he first came to the UK, the Japanese driver knew very little English, as proven when he first tested an F1 car.
Hysterically, Tsunoda thought the word “motherf***er” was “just part of the English language”, as Horner hilariously discovered.
“He came over to the UK to learn English and driving for an English team that was based on the outskirts of London and they are something like out of a movie from ‘Snatch or like a Guy Ritchie movie,” Horner said on the Eff Won with DRS podcast.
“So, you know, this little Japanese guy thought that motherfer, or the word f, was just part of the English language, part of the English vocabulary.
“So he gets in a Formula One car and his very first test and he’s going ‘I’ve got understeer you motherf***er’.
“And did he really say? You know, it was hilarious.”
Tsunoda’s English has improved considerably since his first test in an F1 car, although swearing over the radio remains his trademark in many ways.
In his rookie season back in 2021, Tsunoda revealed that he actually was a fan of “bad words”, most of which he learnt whilst racing for Carlin in the 2020 Formula 2 Championship.
He’s continued to use bad language as he feels like it’s “well suited” to the job of racing in F1, although he admits that he has cut back on how often he used explicit terms.
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“I like bad words!” Tsunoda admitted on the Beyond the Grid podcast in 2021.
“So, I had a really good relationship with the Carlin mechanics also with the engineers, sometimes using bad words. And I learned from there and just I was using bad words for [the] job, you know, and also having fun and I think that’s suited well for that job.
“But yeah, as soon as I realised it when I came to Europe, I just started not really using the bad words because I was using too much bad words.”