- Yuki Tsunoda is in talks with Meyer Shank Racing about a 2027 IndyCar seat, calling the idea “scary” himself while insisting Formula 1 remains his only real plan.
- The Japanese driver, a Red Bull reserve after losing his Racing Bulls seat, says he has no backup plan for F1 itself but will not accept sitting out of racing entirely for another two years.
- Meyer Shank Racing needs as much as $15 million in driver-backed sponsorship to fill its vacant No. 66 entry, a financial barrier that has slowed talks on both sides.
The Driver With No Plan B Is Suddenly Talking About Plan B
Yuki Tsunoda has spent his career insisting he doesn’t need a backup plan: Formula 1 was always going to be the only plan. Asked directly, this year, whether he had one in case his F1 seat didn’t survive into 2027, his answer was blunt: “No, not really.” Weeks later, he was in talks with Meyer Shank Racing about a full-time IndyCar seat for exactly that season.
The contradiction says less about Tsunoda changing his mind than about how little time he has left to avoid the question. A Red Bull reserve driver after losing his Racing Bulls race seat, Tsunoda is 111 grands prix into a career that has never quite delivered the results his talent promised, and 2027 is shaping up as the year the sport finally runs out of seats to offer him.
A Career Running Low on Doors
Tsunoda’s situation inside Red Bull’s driver pipeline has grown more complicated by the week. Liam Lawson, his replacement at Racing Bulls after Tsunoda was promoted and then swiftly demoted from the senior Red Bull team last year, is himself facing pressure from Spanish media reports suggesting Red Bull has promised his seat to Formula 2 talent Nikola Tsolov for 2027. Tsunoda has been filling in at Racing Bulls in Lawson’s place for select sessions this year, arrangements that Tsunoda says have themselves “suspended” any conversations he might otherwise be having about his own future employment.
It leaves him in an unusual middle position: not out of Formula 1, not secured in it, and dependent on decisions other drivers are making about their own careers before he can find out what’s left for his. “My mindset is always focused on Formula 1,” Tsunoda said. “My main goal is to always drive in F1 and be successful. That will always be my mindset, whatever happens.” It is a version of the same answer he has given for years. What’s changed is the sentence he now adds directly after it.
What Scares Him About IndyCar
That sentence is a boundary, not an ambition. “I also don’t want to sit in the garage for two years,” Tsunoda said, ruling out the option of waiting quietly on the sidelines the way other displaced F1 drivers have done in hopes of a seat reopening. IndyCar, for a driver who has spent his entire career in cars with power steering, ground effect aerodynamics, and none of the oval racing that defines half of IndyCar’s calendar, is not a natural fallback so much as the only fallback with real weekly racing attached to it.
He has not hidden his unease about what that racing actually involves. “For me, it’s scary,” Tsunoda said of the switch. “I can’t imagine myself driving more than two hours and being in that car.” IndyCar races regularly run past two hours, especially on ovals, in cars with none of the F1 cockpit’s comfort or driver aids, a category difference that has tripped up more than one grand prix driver attempting the same move. Tsunoda’s own framing made clear this isn’t a driver excited about a new challenge so much as one calculating which discomfort is more tolerable than the alternative. “For now, I am not really aiming or thinking about IndyCar,” he added, “but yeah, why not in the future?”
The Money Problem Nobody’s Solved Yet
If Tsunoda decided tomorrow that IndyCar was the answer, the seat itself would still come with a financial condition that has slowed every conversation so far. Meyer Shank Racing’s vacant No. 66 entry, the car currently driven by Marcus Armstrong before he shifts to the team’s sister entry once Felix Rosenqvist departs for Arrow McLaren, requires as much as $15 million in driver-backed sponsorship to fill. That is a standard now common across IndyCar’s grid as team budgets tighten, but it is a different funding model than the manufacturer-backed pipeline Tsunoda has operated inside from his junior categories onward.
Team co-owner Mike Shank has been careful not to close the door while also not pretending a deal is close. “We have not decided anything yet,” Shank said. “We are talking to everybody in every form of motorsport that are comparable or pertinent to IndyCar.” That is a wide net, and Tsunoda’s name inside it is more a reflection of available star power than a signal that terms are close to being finalized.
Why This Is Happening Now
The timing lines up with a wider reshuffling across open-wheel racing’s driver market this year. Scott Dixon and Felix Rosenqvist’s moves to Arrow McLaren opened seats at Chip Ganassi Racing and Meyer Shank Racing simultaneously, the kind of once-in-a-generation vacancy churn that gives a driver like Tsunoda, otherwise locked out of most IndyCar rosters by long-term contracts, an actual opening to walk through. It is the same reshuffling that has left Christian Lundgaard searching for a 2027 seat of his own, on the other side of the Atlantic from Tsunoda’s F1 paddock, for almost identical reasons: strong performance colliding with a team’s decision to prioritize someone else.
For Tsunoda, the difference is that his displacement isn’t about performance so much as arithmetic. Red Bull’s junior program has more contracted drivers than it has cars to put them in, and Lawson, Tsunoda, Arvid Lindblad and now Tsolov are all being sorted through a pipeline that can only carry two names into 2027’s Racing Bulls seats. Being good enough has rarely been the obstacle in Tsunoda’s career. Being next in line has.
What He’s Actually Choosing Between
Stripped of the diplomacy required of any driver negotiating in public, Tsunoda’s position comes down to two unattractive options if Red Bull doesn’t find him a seat: sit out of top-level racing entirely, or learn an unfamiliar category, on ovals he calls frightening, funded by sponsorship dollars he does not currently have lined up. Framed that way, IndyCar isn’t really a competing ambition to Formula 1. It’s the version of staying employed that exists if Formula 1 says no.
That is not typically how breakthrough career moves get described in the moment they’re happening, and Tsunoda’s own words make clear he isn’t describing it that way either. But racing careers are frequently decided by exactly this kind of arithmetic, quietly, months before anyone announces a contract, and Tsunoda’s is being worked out in public, with no version of his 2027 that doesn’t involve someone else’s decision first.
Whatever he decides, or whatever is decided for him, Tsunoda will spend the rest of this season doing what every displaced driver eventually has to: performing well enough in the car he still has to make either door, Formula 1 or IndyCar, worth walking through. Baku, a circuit unlike almost anything else on the calendar, gives him one more chance to make that case before the sport’s off season turns speculation into contracts.
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