Daniel Ricciardo admitted he was “surprised” to learn he finished 18th in Formula 1 Qualifying for the Spanish Grand Prix, saying the heavily upgraded RB “didn’t feel too bad.”
Much was spoken of RB’s heavily upgraded spec of Formula 1 car ahead of the weekend, with new sidepods, a new floor and a new rear wing.
The question was whether the upgrade would allow RB to challenge further forward and perhaps close in on Aston Martin in the Constructors; standings,
Instead, RB has been struggling to extract performance from its updated Formula 1 machine and Ricciardo, along with team-mate Yuki Tsunoda (17th) was dumped out of Q1 on Saturday.
“I felt like we made a good step today,” said Ricciardo.
“But when Pierre [Hamelin] told me P18, I think it was, we ended up, I didn’t really have anything to say on the radio, because I was honestly quite surprised.
“I knew we’re not going to be at P10, but I honestly thought that would have been good enough for Q2.”
Whilst some might be more alarmed that an extensive upgrade package has delivered a double Q1 exit, but Ricciardo genuinely felt “comfortable” in his car through qualifying after a tricky Friday practice bedding in the changes to his Formula 1 machine.
“I’d like to think there’s still a bit more on the package to figure out,” he said.
“That’s something obviously we’ll keep doing, but on the flip side, I do feel like yesterday we were much more out of balance and actually today in quali the car felt much more together.
“I actually didn’t think the car felt too bad in quali. Of course, there’s some corners where you feel, yeah, ‘oh, it should be flat there,’ so you may be still missing a bit of load, but in general, I felt much better than yesterday.
“So to still be back where we are, I think there’s still a bit more to find I guess.
“I think it just shows that we just, at the moment, don’t have the pace with this current config, so we’ll keep chipping away.”
Looking forward, Ricciardo noted that the F1 triple-header of Spain, Austria and Great Britain will afford RB a significant testing period to figure out how to unlock performance from the new package.
Moreover, with the trio of circuits playing to the weaknesses of the RB, Ricciardo feels that is the best platform to learn.
“There is certainly some similar characteristics in Austria and Silverstone [to Barcelona],” he said.
“On one hand, it’s like, okay, we got some work to do, but at least we have a good few weeks now of a proper test.
“In terms of test the package, test how good we can bounce back, understand it.
“So in a way we have to face it head on and it’s good to have some weak tracks coming up that we can probably learn more about the car on.”
