Daniel Ricciardo feels that despite a disappointing Spanish GP, there is still no need to scrap the upgrades that the RB F1 Team brought to Barcelona.
RB introduced many important updates at the Spanish GP last week. Despite that, the team had one of its worst weekends so far. Yuki Tsunoda and Ricciardo only qualified in P17 and P18, while in the race they only managed to come home in 19th and 15th.
Even though the car didn’t perform as expected, Ricciardo thinks that it is too soon to say that the upgrades didn’t work, and it is already time to go back to the old parts.
“I think that temptation probably only exists in maybe 72 hours,” Ricciardo admitted. “If we’re still unsure or there’s no clear answer, then maybe we say: ‘Okay. do we just for the time being go back?’
“But right now I’m not there yet to resort to that. Once we put everything on the table, if we’re still like that, then that probably becomes a question.”
Ricciardo also admitted that both in qualifying and the race, he felt good with the car, and he was happy with the overall balance. However, the team needs to work before Austria to fully understand how to extract every grain of performance from the new package.
“It was a really, really strange weekend for us to have dropped off so much,” the Australian explained.
“I didn’t have a bad feeling in qualifying. In the debrief, Yuki and I both felt we did good laps, we felt like the balance wasn’t bad.
“I think simply lacked the load, and we probably don’t really get everything out of the new package.
“Honestly, I felt good in the race. I was happy with what I got out of it, but 15th is not something that we can be happy about.
“I’ve got plenty of notes and feedback from the race. The next 48-72 hours [we have] lots of things to look at.”