Venue: Suzuka Dates: 4-6 April Race start: 06:00 BST on Sunday

Coverage: Live radio commentary of practice and qualifying on BBC 5 Sports Extra, race live on BBC Radio 5 Live. Live text updates on the BBC Sport website and app

We are only two races into the 2025 Formula 1 season and there has already been a major driver change with Red Bull promoting Yuki Tsunoda to replace Liam Lawson.

Tsunoda competes at his home grand prix in Japan this weekend as team-mate to world champion Max Verstappen for the first time, with New Zealander Lawson demoted to Racing Bulls.

BBC Sport F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your questions on the Red Bull situation and more before the race in Suzuka.

What would be a good season for Yuki Tsunoda after the recent driver switch? – David

Red Bull’s decision to demote Liam Lawson after just two races and put Yuki Tsunoda in the second Red Bull alongside Max Verstappen is nothing less than a career lifeline for Tsunoda.

The 24-year-old Japanese was staring at the likely end of his career this season.

That’s because he owed his seat at the second Red Bull team to Honda, and it is moving to Aston Martin for 2026, where there is no seat available to Tsunoda and no realistic prospect of one.

Without Honda, the chances of Racing Bulls keeping Tsunoda for 2026 were slim, when there are other Red Bull juniors coming along the conveyor belt.

So a seat alongside Verstappen this year gives him the opportunity to show once and for all that he deserves a long-time place in F1.

But what level of performance would do that?

The fact remains that Red Bull have a minimum level of expectation for their second driver – and that’s to be within about 0.3 seconds a lap of Verstappen on a consistent basis.

That’s what Tsunoda needs to do to convince Red Bull that he deserves to be considered as a contender for a seat in 2026.

And realistically if he does not do that, he is unlikely to convince anyone else that he is worth investing in either.

If Max Verstappen leaves Red Bull are they in even greater trouble than just losing their star driver? It seems like they’d be losing the only person who can drive their car, a situation that’s seemingly self-inflicted. Are they likely to be making their 2026 car more driveable to mitigate this risk? – Tom

One of the most interesting aspects of the Lawson-Tsunoda driver swap is that it gives another perspective on the state Red Bull are in with their car.

Verstappen believes it is the fourth quickest car in F1 at the moment – so behind the McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari. Although on average qualifying pace in the three sessions so far, it is actually second fastest behind the McLaren.

But it may be that it is only both of those things with Verstappen in it.

The issue for Red Bull is that they have one genius-level driver and one average one, in F1 terms – and that remains the case with Tsunoda in the second seat, or at least that’s what most would believe right now.

So it’s almost a case of split the difference between the drivers to judge the level of the car.

The bottom line seems to be that the new Red Bull is simply not that good a car, and certainly one which is unpredictable and does not generate confidence in a driver. Even Verstappen finds it difficult to drive – but he is so good that he is able to coax a good lap time out of it.

Verstappen is regarded by most as the best driver in F1 at the moment – so if that’s true, it stands to reason that the car would be worse with pretty much anyone else in it.

It seems Red Bull have chased peak aerodynamic performance at the expense of drivability – which is ironic, because that is exactly the opposite of the philosophy that Adrian Newey has championed throughout his career.

Legendary designer Newey, who stopped working on Red Bull in F1 last April, and has just come to the end of his first month with Aston Martin, has always believed that it was better to have slightly less downforce that the driver can use all of, than more theoretical downforce that can’t be accessed because the car is too “peaky”. Or, as Lawson put it, the “window” is too narrow.

Like all teams, Red Bull designed the best car they could for the new season. The question that hangs over them now is, do they know how to fix it?

After another very dry sprint race in China I wonder again why F1 doesn’t give the teams tyres that enables the drivers to race through a sprint. Surely the point of the sprint is it is fast, exciting and full of action? – Richard

This is a question about tyre management. The fact is that – with a few very limited exceptions – drivers have never been able to race flat out since Pirelli entered F1 as the tyre supplier in 2011.

That’s not how their tyres work. Pirelli tyres have to be managed to stay within a temperature window.

Drive them flat out and they overheat. And if they overheat, they rarely come back to optimum grip level. Sometimes this is even the case over a single qualifying lap.

Pirelli has been asked before to provide tyres that can be driven flat out, but so far it has not done so.

Is this season a write-off for Aston Martin? – Carlos

It’s not looking good so far, is it?

On average, the Aston Martin is the seventh fastest car over a single lap over the first three races of the season, including the China sprint. Only the Alpine, Sauber and Haas have been slower.

It’s fair to say that Fernando Alonso has not had his best start to a season, and mistakes in qualifying at both races so far have hurt the team’s ultimate potential.

So, it’s not completely clear yet what the car’s ceiling is.

Aston Martin came into this season with two main aims – to produce a more drivable car, and to prove that they could solve the correlation issues they have had between simulation and the real world and design upgrades that perform as expected.

The drivers say that it is more drivable than last year – it’s just not that quick.

If they can prove their upgrades work, then the season will be at least a qualified success, regardless of the performance of the car to some extent.

So it is probably fair to wait for at least the first upgrade package – which would typically be expected around May some time – before forming any firm conclusions.

Is there a circuit(s) you’d really want on the calendar that currently isn’t on there? And at the expense of which current circuit(s)? I love Fuji and I’m not a fan of street circuits – RAP

The F1 calendar has a pretty good selection of circuits at the moment.

There are some obvious candidates in the United States – Road America and Laguna Seca are both great circuits. But then so is Austin, and both Miami and Las Vegas work for the sport on a financial level.

Bathurst in Australia is awesome – but not suitable for F1, sadly.

As for Fuji, great backdrop, when the clouds are not covering Mount Fuji, but as a circuit it is not a patch on Suzuka.

The one big miss in terms of the calendar is France. Somehow, it seems wrong not to have a grand prix in the country that gave birth to motorsport and hosted the first race with that title, even if Monaco is regarded as a sort of proxy French race.

The problem is that France’s only circuits with licences for F1 are Paul Ricard and Magny-Cours. Uninspiring both.

But if the Sarthe circuit at Le Mans could be brought up to F1 standard and host a grand prix, that would be quite something.