Ricciardo frustrated by 'strange' Spanish GP

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Daniel Ricciardo clearly didn't feel that Sunday's Spanish Grand Prix had been one of the most enjoyable outings of his F1 career to date, after finishing the race in a lonely fifth place.

The Red Bull driver had been frustrated by an inconsistent afternoon in the RB14, which included a spin that was missed by the television coverage.

“It was certainly a strange race," he said after the finish. "At the beginning we had good pace and it seemed like Kimi [Raikkonen] was a bit slower than Max and myself.

"I thought I was faster than them but then once they picked up the pace I wasn’t really able to go with them.

"When we pitted for the medium tyre we came out in traffic and lost some rhythm," he continued. "It was just a bit tricky to drive.

"There were moments where the car was really fast but it was just too difficult to get it every lap. I would set the fastest lap and then the next lap I would nearly spin.

"If you got lucky, you could put in a blistering lap," he estimated. "But probably one in five I could make it happen, and the other four laps I was sliding and struggling to stay on.

Race report: Commanding Hamilton comfortably reigns in Spain

"It was fast when you were able to put it all together - but easy to make mistakes. It was a bit on a knife-edge."

An example of this is when he lost control during a restart following a spell under Virtual Safety Car conditions.

"I had a spin on the VSC restart," he admitted. "[I was] struggling to keep heat in the tyres

"Fortunately there were no walls but it put me in no-man’s land," he added. "It really put me out of the race."

"In the end, it was a pretty boring race but I’m going to take some positives from the potential we have," he said.

The team had rolled out a raft of upgrades to the car this weekend. While promising, he said that it would take time to fully optimise them into the RB14.

"There is potential but it’s just hard to extract consistently at the moment, so we have some more to learn with this new package."

And he could make an early breakthrough, given that Monaco is one of Red Bull's strongest circuits on the Formula 1 calendar.

"Monaco should be our strongest circuit to date on raw pace so I’m looking forward to getting there in a few weeks.”

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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.