Ricciardo: We can take the fight to Ferrari at Silverstone

Daniel Ricciardo is confident that Red Bull will be able to challenge Ferrari in Sunday's British Grand Prix.

Ricciardo was over a second off Valtteri Bottas' new track record time at Silverstone on Friday. He was also some six tenths slower that the two Ferrari drivers. Even so, the Aussie remained optimistic about his prospects this weekend.

"Mercedes were rapid today," Ricciardo told reporters after the end of practice. "Normally they are quicker in qualifying, so we will let them do their thing at the moment.

"But I think on one-lap pace we can get Ferrari," he insisted. "We can definitely improve from where we are.

"I think we have learned a lot today. In the end we didn't get the right balance or feeling, but we will make some changes tonight and have a better car tomorrow."

He was sure that the performance gap to Ferrari wasn't as big as Friday's timesheets made it look.

"I don't think it's 0.6s. It is more that we still need to work. They are definitely a bit quicker, and we didn't have a great session.

"The car balance was not fantastic. It felt a bit better in first practice and we need to understand why. We're a little bit too slow at the moment so we still need to work for sure."

Ricciardo added that the gusty wind on Friday hadn't helped Red Bull, but that taking Copse flat-out had still been 'fun'.

Bottas continues to narrowly set the pace in FP2

Ricciardo's team mate Max Verstappen had similar thoughts about there being room for improvement over the handling of the RB13.

"I was not really happy in the second practice with the balance of the car," he said, echoing Ricciardo's comments.

"But yeah, I think we are a little bit too slow at the moment so we still need to work, for sure.

"I guess that's the case the whole year, isn't it? We're always running a bit behind in that way. We just need to work hard on the car to find time."

Friday's test had shown few problems with degradation, and not a huge difference in speed between the soft and supersoft compounds. That meant there was still a lot to think about in terms of race strategy for Sunday.

"Haven't really looked into it too much, but I think a one-stop is optimistic," suggested Verstappen.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.