Ricciardo relieved McLaren closer to rivals than feared

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Daniel Ricciardo is pleased that McLaren came alive in qualifying, with both cars making it into the final top ten pole shoot-out round and closer to their main rivals Ferrari and AlphaTauri than expected.

Lando Norris finished Friday evening's session in eighth place just ahead of Ricciardo, with both drivers hoping to make progress in tomorrow's sprint race to improve their prsoects in the Sao Pauli Grand Prix.

“It’s only an eighth and ninth but from where we were this morning we can be happy with that," said Ricciardo. "To get both cars in Q3 is not a bad afternoon.

Read also: Hamilton to start from P1 in Saturday Sao Paulo sprint

"I know it’s towards the tail-end of the top ten, but the deficit is a lot smaller than we thought," he said. "We’re there, we’re in the fight, and we can put some pressure on them now.

Neither McLaren had mad it into the top ten in the earlier session, with Ricciardo mired in 19th place at the end of FP1.

"We’ll look to move up from here but the step we made from this morning to this evening was pretty good.”

"We didn’t run the soft earlier but I felt like we didn’t have a whole lot of pace to show either," he admitted. "It felt better on the soft [in qualifying]."

Norris was also relieved to see McLaren rebounding from its issues earlier in the day.

“I think we have to be happy with qualifying, because we were struggling quite a bit this morning in FP1," he said. "After making some good improvements coming into quali, I felt a lot more confident with the car

"We would’ve loved to have been ahead of the Ferraris, but we have to take P8 and P9 today because they were quicker," he added. "We’re in a good position to fight them tomorrow."

"“At the end of the first day of this sprint event in Brazil we’re relatively satisfied," declared McLaren'e executive racing director Andrea Stella. "e’re in the game, that’s the important thing.

"The mechanics in the garage did a good job late last night in difficult circumstances to get the cars ready to perform.

"We now have to carry on that work in FP2, have a good sprint qualifying and progress towards scoring good points on Sunday.”

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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.