It’s not often that the paddock’s favourite Aussie, Daniel Ricciardo, admits defeat but come 2pm on Saturday afternoon in Shanghai he had all but resigned himself to not taking part in qualifying for the Chinese Grand Prix as his Red Bull mechanics faced a race against time to swap his Renault power unit.
After stopping early in FP3 with a suspected turbo failure, and pulling off the track on the long back straight, Ricciardo’s mechanics had less than two hours for the power unit swap.
And despite the fact that Reggie had to prepare a new power unit for the Red Bull team, the pit crew managed to get the Aussie out onto the track with just over two minutes to spare before the end of Q1.
"Obviously it was really close – definitely weren't doing it for the cameras,” said a rather relived Ricciardo after qualifying sixth. “That was literally as quick as we could have got out. With about half an hour to go I went in to see the engineers, I said, 'How are we looking?' I was always going to get ready regardless but they were realistic as opposed to optimistic and they said it's going to be very tight. It was kind of like, 'Get ready but sorry if it doesn't happen.'
"I was obviously prepared but didn't really expect it so it was cool to get out there. We had a bit going on but very happy to have got it done for the boys as well. They worked their arse off for two hours and if we had just missed it by a minute it would have been heartbreaking.
"It's a pretty short run to Turn 1 in Shanghai – if it's a long one obviously their horsepower is going to give them an advantage but here I think it's probably more traction-biased than power-biased because of the short run.
"Obviously us having the UltraSoft, if we make a clean launch, I think we can try and get at least one spot, just on pure performance. Hopefully it's short enough that the power doesn't compromise the good start we could have."
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