Daniel Ricciardo says he almost aborted his final run in qualifying for the Mexican Grand Prix and was surprised it earned him fourth on the grid.
The two Red Bulls looked competitive in qualifying and entered Q3 with Max Verstappen having already gone under the 1m19s mark. However, neither could replicate that time in the final part of the session, with Ricciardo's last lap seeing him 0.4s off the pace in the opening sector.
Ricciardo says the lap never really came back to him in terms of feeling, which left him surprised to improve by a little under 0.1s with a lap he believes was his worst qualifying attempt.
"To be honest it was a weird session," Ricciardo said. "I thought the last run in Q3 was pretty horrendous to be honest. I came out of Turn 6 and I think I was four tenths slower than my previous lap, so I was thinking about aborting my lap because it was nowhere.
"Just out of Turn 1 the car started sliding and I couldn’t understand why, but then we found a lot of time in the last sector. It was a weird session. A fraction of the second was everywhere, so there was a chunk but at the same time it was like that for everywhere. I don’t imagine everyone is that happy with the balance.
"To be four tenths off pole with what I thought was one of the worst laps of my qualifying career was pretty interesting. I didn’t feel like I drove a worse lap, it just felt like a terrible lap in terms of the balance and from Turn 1 it was messy so recovering the whole lap. Second row is not too bad considering."
With the two Red Bulls starting from third and fourth on supersofts compared to the two Mercedes drivers on softs, Ricciardo is hopeful of being able to use the tyre advantage at the start of the race to challenge at the front.
"Both Max and I wanted the super-soft this weekend and the team was leaning towards that, so that is why we decided not to split it. We decided it was the better thing. I think a one-stop here is tricky. We thought Mercedes would be on the soft, so like Austin we maybe felt we have a better chance to do something.
"We can afford to take the risk because we are not fighting for a whole lot, so go for the high risk strategy to give us a chance to jump them at the start and force them to do something different. We feel that is the best way to stay in the race tomorrow."
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