Tsunoda blames himself for his collision-filled race at the Red Bull Ring

On the back of a tough and disappointing race at last Sunday's Austrian Grand Prix, Red Bull driver Yuki Tsunoda has blamed himself for his collision-filled race at the Red Bull Ring.

Although Max Verstappen wasn’t quite able to take the top spot across practice, he looked fairly competitive in the third and final practice on Saturday.

However, the Dutchman was unable to challenge for top places in qualifying, complaining about the overall balance of his RB21. In Q3, the reigning champion appeared to be in contention for P5 on the grid, but he was forced to abort his final flying lap due to yellow flags brought out for a spin by Pierre Gasly.

Although Verstappen had been expected to bounce back from his disappointing result in qualifying, the Dutchman's race ended after just three corners. The reigning champion's Red Bull was tagged by the Mercedes of Andrea Kimi Antonelli at Turn 3, with the incident forcing Verstappen to retire from the action.

The incident left Yuki Tsunoda as the only Red Bull driver out there. The Japanese driver started from P18 after a disappointing qualifying session on Saturday.

Tsunoda collided with Stroll early on as he tried to barge past the Canadian, which the stewards decided was a racing incident. However, the Red Bull driver had another collision with Alpine's Franco Colapinto for which he received a 10-second time penalty.

Asked whether he has managed to find out the cause for his issues that hindered his performance at the Red Bull Ring, the Japanese driver blamed himself for his poor result at Red Bull's home race.

"The issue in the race was me. The overtake… tried to overtake in a way that probably I could just wait one more lap. It was a bit unnecessary to push flat out that much in that situation.

"So, the race craft wasn’t ideal for myself. The pace itself, yeah, to be honest, after that… changed the front wing and everything and just, it’s not really probably the best reference I'll get.

"But, yeah, it’s still the mostly the session I’m working on really hard so far. Especially the long run is the stint or the session I’m normally struggling at. So we worked so hard last couple of days into here, what we can do better or not.

"And we're going to try another couple of stuff that I never thought about. So yeah, I'm looking forward to it, feeling strong. I think in the short run it will just come hopefully soon in terms of the confidence level I want," Tsunoda concluded.