---
title: "VIDEO: Yuki Tsunoda's car on fire"
publishDate: 2026-02-24T17:14:29.597Z
lastUpdated: 2026-02-25T13:12:01.971Z
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html: https://tarmactimes.com/en/f1/articles/yuki-tsunodas-car-on-fire/xrfhf6
md: https://tarmactimes.com/en/f1/articles/yuki-tsunodas-car-on-fire/xrfhf6/llms.txt
---
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Last Saturday, Yuki Tsunoda climbed into a Formula 1 car for the first time since Red Bull showed him the door. The occasion was a Ford-backed showrun along Marina Boulevard in San Francisco. The car was the RB7, the 2011 championship winner that carried Sebastian Vettel to his second title. The crowd was enthusiastic. It was going to be a good day.
It was not entirely a good day.
## A comeback nobody planned
Tsunoda had been replaced at Red Bull by rookie Isack Hadjar ahead of the 2026 season, stepping into a reserve role that comes with simulator duties, standby cover, and, as it turns out, demonstration runs in vintage machinery. His pre-event quote, reported by GPBlog, had the cheerful energy of someone making the best of things.
– I can't wait to get back behind the wheel of an F1 car and to do that in the RB7 in San Francisco will be amazing. I'm really looking forward to getting out there, doing some donuts and making some real F1 noise in front of the crowds.
He did the donuts. He made the noise. Then the rear of the car caught fire.
## What happened on Marina Boulevard
The RB7 is a pre-hybrid V8 car, loud and raw in a way modern F1 machinery simply isn't. After an extended run and a series of burnouts, the exhaust system overheated and ignited the back of the car. Smoke first, then flames. The crowd, which had been chanting Tsunoda's name, started shouting at him to get out.
He did, calmly, without assistance. Red Bull confirmed to GPFans that marshals extinguished the fire quickly and nobody was hurt. The show, remarkably, carried on around the stationary burning car.
Red Bull's statement was brief and factual, as these things tend to be.
– Following an extended demo run, Yuki performed routine burnouts in the 2011 RB7. The exhaust system overheated, igniting the rear of the car. The fire was quickly extinguished by on-site marshals, and no one was injured.
## The bigger picture
The fire itself is the kind of incident that gets filed under "occupational hazard of running 15-year-old racing cars hard." The same RB7 caught fire at a showrun in Russia back in 2014. Tsunoda had a similar moment in Taiwan in 2024, in a 2012-spec Red Bull. These things happen with old high-revving V8s pushed through repeated burnouts.
What I find more interesting is the context. This was Tsunoda's first time back in an F1 car after losing a seat he had held for five years. He was not doing it at a race weekend, not in front of the Bahrain paddock, not in the simulator. He was doing donuts on a boulevard in California while his replacement was wrapping up pre-season testing on the other side of the world.
The crowd chanted his name anyway, even after the fire. That says something about where Tsunoda stands with fans, even if Red Bull's hierarchy sees him differently.
Whether that goodwill translates into another race seat somewhere, at some point, is a question worth watching. For now, the job is this: keep the seat warm, do the demos, hope nothing catches fire.
Two out of three on Saturday.
[Watch video](https://youtu.be/LxQRfxLjSgI)