- Yuki Tsunoda is expected to test an IndyCar at Barber Motorsports Park on October 26, a step that could open a path to Meyer Shank Racing’s Honda factory seat arriving in 2028.
- Tsunoda spent parts of five seasons in Formula 1 with Red Bull’s junior and senior teams before losing his seat, and only a handful of part time opportunities remain open to him there.
- He drove an IndyCar once before, in a 2024 crossover test, and said afterward that it “just feels a bit more like karting” than the car he spent his career chasing.
“It Just Feels a Bit More Like Karting”
Yuki Tsunoda said that line in 2024, describing an IndyCar to Road & Track after a Honda-backed crossover test on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway road course. At the time it read as a passing observation from a Formula 1 driver indulging a one-off outing. Two years later it reads like a preview. Tsunoda is now expected to climb back into an IndyCar at Barber Motorsports Park on October 26, and this time the stakes run well past curiosity.
IndyCar’s October test is a big industry date on its own terms. Close to half the field’s teams plan to bring drivers to Barber, some evaluating prospects and some developing parts for next season. Tsunoda’s name on that list is still unusual: five years ago he looked like a long-term fixture in Formula 1, not a driver auditioning for an American open-wheel seat.
Running Out of Road in Formula 1
Tsunoda arrived in Formula 1 in 2021 through Honda’s junior program and Red Bull’s development pipeline, landing at what was then AlphaTauri with a reputation for blunt radio outbursts and flashes of real speed. He spent years establishing himself as the most reliable option in Red Bull’s junior team before getting the call every driver in that pipeline wants: a promotion to the senior Red Bull seat alongside Max Verstappen in 2025. It is one of the most exposed seats in the sport, a job that has worn down other drivers before him, and Tsunoda did not survive the year in it. Red Bull moved him back out before the season even finished.
This year brought him three races with VCARB, the renamed junior team, filling in rather than racing a full campaign of his own. Beyond that, his options have mostly dried up. No full-time 2027 seat exists for him anywhere on the grid right now, and the paddock’s informal math on where a driver like Tsunoda lands next has increasingly pointed away from Formula 1 altogether.
A Second Chance at Barber
That is what makes the Barber test matter. Dale Coyne Racing is currently the only Honda-powered IndyCar team with an unfilled seat for next season, which leaves little room for Tsunoda to land immediately. The bigger prize sits a year further out. Meyer Shank Racing takes over Honda’s new manufacturer-backed charter entry in 2028, a seat built for the long term rather than a single season, and an evaluation outing now is exactly the kind of low-risk way for both sides to find out whether Tsunoda fits it.
He will not be the only name in that conversation. Linus Lundqvist, IndyCar’s 2024 Rookie of the Year, and Kakunoshin Ohta, the current points leader in Japan’s Super Formula championship, are also understood to be under consideration for the same factory-backed opportunity. Tsunoda is not being handed a seat. He is applying for one, against drivers with their own strong claims to it.
What Reinvention Looks Like for a Former Red Bull Prospect
There is a particular kind of adjustment waiting for a driver who built his entire racing identity around Formula 1’s rhythms: the DRS zones, the single-file qualifying laps, the tight, insular paddock that follows the same twenty-odd cars around the world. IndyCar asks something different. Ovals require a kind of patience and feel that road racing never teaches. Push-to-pass rewards timing over outright pace. The ladder underneath Tsunoda would not be Formula 2 prospects anymore but American short-track graduates and Indy NXT champions, a different pool of talent entirely.
None of that is a step down so much as a different sport wearing a similar shape. Tsunoda would be trading a seat at the sharpest, most scrutinized end of motorsport for a chance to build something new, closer to the ground, in a series that still rewards the kind of racer he always said he wanted to be when the radio calmed down and the car just moved the way he asked it to.
The Test That Will Say More Than Five Years of Radio Clips
Tsunoda spent five seasons answering questions about pace, temperament, and whether he could handle the biggest seat Red Bull had to offer. Barber will not settle his career in one afternoon, but it will tell both him and Meyer Shank Racing something neither side currently knows for certain: whether the car that once felt like karting can become the next real chapter, rather than a curiosity he tried once and left behind.
The Junior Program That Made Him
Tsunoda’s path to Formula 1 ran through Honda’s talent pipeline and a rapid climb through Europe’s junior ranks, finishing on the podium in Formula 2 in a single season before Red Bull fast-tracked him straight to a race seat the following year. Few drivers in that program moved as quickly from relative unknown to grand prix starter, and for a while it looked like validation of the whole system: find the right young talent in Japan, put him through Europe at speed, hand him a Formula 1 seat before he turns twenty-one. The outbursts over team radio became part of his identity almost immediately, a driver who raced with his emotions close to the surface and rarely bothered to hide them.
What that early speed did not buy him was time. Red Bull’s junior pipeline has kept producing candidates behind him, and the queue for seats at AlphaTauri, VCARB, and the senior team never stopped moving. Tsunoda outlasted several of those rivals by staying useful race after race, which is how a driver who was never the most talked-about name in the pipeline ended up, improbably, in the senior Red Bull seat in 2025.
A Grid That Doesn’t Forget
Formula 1’s driver market has only grown more crowded in the years after that. Red Bull has leaned on other junior graduates to fill the seats Tsunoda once occupied, and the wider grid has very little patience for a driver without a current contract, regardless of what he showed in years past. That is the real backdrop to the Barber test. It is not just about whether Tsunoda can adapt to an IndyCar. It is about whether Formula 1, a sport with a long memory for potential and a short one for loyalty, has already decided it is finished with him.
A Driver Who Still Has Something to Prove
Tsunoda has never lacked for raw pace. What followed him through five seasons in Formula 1 was a question about whether he could pair that pace with the composure a top team wants, a question he never fully answered before Red Bull moved on. IndyCar would not erase that question so much as reframe it. A driver who struggled to find consistency at the top of Formula 1 would be starting over in a series where oval feel, fuel strategy, and push-to-pass timing matter as much as one quick lap, a different test of the same raw ability.
It would also put him in front of a smaller but no less demanding audience: team owners who do not care what a driver did in Formula 1 qualifying three years ago and only care whether he can read a restart, save fuel on a long green-flag run, and bring the car home in one piece often enough to be worth a seat. Barber is where that evaluation starts, on a road course rather than an oval, which suits a driver still feeling his way back into an unfamiliar car before the harder ovals test him later.
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