Daniel Ricciardo says he expected to have limited running in Friday free practice for the Spanish Grand Prix, although Red Bull did not put the fourth allocated engine into his Renault-powered RB11 before FP2.
The initial plan was to use the same power unit throughout the day but another troubled morning session led the Milton Keynes-based team and its French engine supplier to install Ricciardo's fourth ICE in the afternoon.
Having covered a mere nine laps in FP1, the 25-year-old was then sidelined for most of the second session and had to wait until the closing stages to head back out on track.
“Of course it’s not nice seeing everyone else on track, you want to be out there,” said Ricciardo.
“We expected today to be limited with mileage and then obviously we had to put the fourth engine in FP2, which was I guess on the schedule. But as I said, we knew we would not do much today.
“Ideally, we tried to keep one engine in for all the day but that was always optimistic. We expected the change to come but we probably tried to hold on a little bit too long and that’s why it delayed us.”
Ricciardo’s solitary flying attempt put him a lowly 13th in the afternoon but the Australian takes encouragement from team-mate Daniil Kvyat setting the fifth fastest time, less than two tenths off Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari.
Red Bull has brought a raft of car developments to Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, including a new nose. While he was not able to sample the upgrades on track, Ricciardo hopes these will help him push up the pecking order.
“The laps we did, I think we’ve still got a lot to learn. It would have been nice to get more running. Daniil had a cleaner session so we’ll look at what they’ve done and try and learn a few things for tomorrow.
“I think obviously there’s a lot of potential with (the upgrades). I don’t think we got it working in the window it should be, at least not on my car. It’s hard because I just did two laps this afternoon, and it wasn’t where we wanted it to be. It will be better but we’ve just got to understand what it's like and get more pace out of it.”
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