Daniel Ricciardo says he needs to be an “adult” with his emotions after disappointing qualifying at the Red Bull Ring on Friday.
Ricciardo’s Friday at the Austrian Grand Prix went from bad to worse from practice to qualifying.
His preparations for the weekend were hampered in FP1 when he suffered a DRS problem which meant he could not complete his scheduled programme.
Taking to the track for qualifying, he was off the pace and finished 16th, missing out on a Q2 place by 0.024s.
Asked by FoxSports where he was losing his pace, the clearly frustrated driver replied: “Everywhere a little bit.
“I don’t want to just come out of the turnstiles and say ‘see you later’; Obviously I just want to figure it out and the only way it will get better is if I try to learn and understand a bit more.
“So yeah, try to just be an adult in this situation.
“Of course I’m going to give a little bit of emotion, whatever, but at the end of the day we’ve still got a long weekend ahead of us so I’ve still got to keep my eyes on the prize and know that it’s going to get better if we keep working .”
This is the end of Q1. Lando makes it through, but unfortunately Daniel is out.
NO 🇬🇧 P8RIC 🇦🇺 P16#AustrianGP 🇦🇹 pic.twitter.com/WIvBbtPcUm
— McLaren (@McLarenF1) July 8, 2022
McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl said his driver was “struggling to extract performance” from the car.
But with Lando Norris ultimately only making it to P15, one place ahead of his Australian team-mate, Seidl admits the whole session wasn’t good enough.
He continued: “We need to get to the bottom of this and make sure we remove all these different issues as quickly as possible.
“If you look at FP1, on Daniel’s side we had a DRS problem that compromised our execution plan. We couldn’t go through the full program as we were focused on solving the DRS problem.
“On the Lando side, unfortunately after installing a new PU for this weekend we had a loss of power. This is something we still need to explore together with our colleagues at Mercedes.
“Still, we managed to get both cars ready for qualifying. But then right after the first outing we had a brake-by-cable issue on Lando’s side that didn’t allow him to push the car to the limit, give him confidence and then didn’t allow him to set a meaningful lap time in Q2.
“It’s a shame because I think the lap times he could have done in Q1 could have seen the potential we had for the pack today.
“But then it doesn’t count if you don’t pull it together as a team.”
Add Comment