RB’s Yuki Tsunoda and Daniel Ricciardo both qualified among the top ten at Imola, yet the Japanese charger expected a better performance than seventh in Saturday’s shootout.
This weekend marks the first time this season that both RB chargers managed to progress to the final round of qualifying together.
Tsunoda was particularly impressive in the second segment of the session during which he briefly held the second fastest lap time.
And as an extra bonus, Tsunoda reached Q3 while saving an extra set of the soft compound, something that might come in handy in Sunday’s race.
Nevertheless, the Japanese driver wasn’t entirely satisfied with his performance in the grid-defining session.
“I didn’t really put it all together, so I’m not really fully happy,” he said. “But I think until then it was pretty good.
“It’s the first time I was able to go through with one set [of tyres] in Q2 so that’s definitely positive. Overall this week was a pretty solid week. So I just [need to] finish strong also tomorrow as well.”
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Tsunoda said that his own RB team has been surprised by their VCARB 01’s pas this weekend at the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari.
“But obviously the amount of work, the people worked hard to develop our car, it was massive and for sure that’s paying off really well,” he said.
“For myself, I just keep focusing to extract performance from the car.”
On the other side of the Faenza team’s garage, Ricciardo clocked in ninth fastest, a little over two tenths behind his teammate, but admitted having struggled a bit more than the latter since the beginning of the weekend.
“I think Yuki was really comfortable from lap one at the start of [first practice] yesterday,” commented Ricciardo, quoted by RaceFans. .
“He was pretty happy with the car from the start and I was just trying to find a little bit here and there.
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“The first sector was where I honestly struggled quite a lot. We made some small progress but that’s where the lap got away from me. But I’ll work on it and we’ll keep looking at it.
“Otherwise the rest of the lap I’m happy, comfortable.”
Ricciardo suggested that Tsunoda's frequent running at Imola in the past might have contributed to his strong qualifying performance.
“He was driving really well all weekend,” he added. “I think home track advantage – he said he’s driving here every day, I don’t know, doing some kind of underground testing – but he did a good job.”
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