Daniel Ricciardo says he’ll be heading into Sunday’s Austrian Grand Prix with a “guesswork” car setup following changes implemented by RB after Saturday’s Sprint event.
The Faenza-based outfit arrived at the Red Bull Ring somewhat dazed and confused after a troubled race weekend in Barcelona where the team struggled to fully understand its new upgrade package.
The team had high hopes that the wholesale changes brought to its VCARB 01 would yield a performance boost, but the new parts failed to deliver a tangible step forward.
RB responded with a split program for Ricciardo and teammate Yuki Tsunoda during Friday practice, equipping each driver’s car with different specifications in a bid to eventually converge to the best configuration.
While not a perfect solution, it offered a starting point, with Tsunoda and Ricciardo finishing Saturday's Sprint event respectively P13 and P14.
But RB capitalized on the opportunity to further refine its cars’ setups ahead of qualifying as F1’s parc fermé regulations now permit. And the changes proved beneficial with Ricciardo set to line up P11 on Sunday’s grid after missing out on Q3 by just 0.015s.
“We certainly seem better,” commented the Aussie, quoted by Speedcafe.
“I think yesterday [Friday] was a lot [better]. We were still trying a lot and then you have one set [of soft tyres] in Q1, so it was it was always going to be tricky.
©RB
“But today, I think having a little bit more of an understanding, having the race this morning, and then we had, I think, five runs in qualifying today, we used five softs, we were able to get the car in a better window.
“So, still not quite a Q3 car, but we're there.”
Ricciardo nevertheless admitted that he’ll be launching off the grid on Sunday afternoon with a car setup based on limited data and a touch of optimism.
“From the Sprint race this morning, we did a bit more fine-tuning and I feel like the car was in a better place,” he added.
“I hope that that means a good thing for tomorrow, but it's still guesswork, you know, with a full tank of fuel, probably another hot track tomorrow.
“Who knows if we're going to have Alpine pace or whatever, but hopefully we do.
“Hopefully, it's a two-stop. I think it probably will be with the track conditions, I know some cars save two mediums, some saved two hards so that could be quite a determining factor.”
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