Daniel Ricciardo is happy with the development Visa Cash App RB has made this weekend, but he is disappointed that he was not able to place in the top ten shootout for the 2024 Austrian Grand Prix. After defeating his teammate in the previous two races, Ricciardo went into the weekend hoping for another strong finish. However, it was a challenging Sprint qualifying and race. Dr. Helmut Marko’s remarks regarding Ricciardo’s future with RB are also significant, as the Oracle Red Bull Racing team advisor is eager to offer Liam Lawson an opportunity in a full-time race seat.
Another disappointing weekend of performance was likely after the team’s poor performance at the Spanish Grand Prix, especially in light of the evidence from the Sprint. However, significant setup changes have allowed both drivers—Ricciardo in particular—to find more performance. The 34-year-old qualified ahead of his teammate and was only +0.015s away from qualifying for Q3. In an interview with F1TV, Ricciardo expressed his frustration, but he also saw some silver lining given their sprint performance.
Naturally, he expressed annoyance, but he distinguished between two kinds of frustration, one of which was constructive in nature because, despite our disappointment at having missed Q3 by almost nothing, they felt that they had made significant progress since yesterday. “Yesterday at this time, we were in the SQ1 class with narrow margins, but this circuit is going to produce such short lap times that it will be inevitable.” We should be proud of the fact that, despite our frustration, we are still in the battle today.
It improves our situation significantly. We made several changes to the car yesterday, and it was going to be difficult because we only had one set of tires in SQ1. However, today we had a little more time to adjust to the adjustments, and I feel like we were almost there on every lap, but I’m happy when we can string many laps together.
To help Racing Belle Vue investigate the cause of their unexpected performance decline, Ricciardo and teammate Yuki Tsunoda are running separate cars with varying specs that combine new and old parts. Following the significant setup modifications, the Australian driver expressed optimism that they would have a strong chance to score points in the entire race on Sunday while speaking with MotorsportWeek and confirming that they were still running two different chassis specifications.
It is indeed a mixture. We made some additional adjustments following the Sprint race this morning, and I believe the car was in a better position. “Of course, I hope that this portends well for tomorrow, but even with a full tank of gas and likely another hot track, it’s still guesswork. Who knows if we’ll have Alpine pace or anything else, but maybe we do. I hope it’s a two-stop, and given the conditions of the track, I believe it most likely will be. Some cars have saved two Mediums, and some have saved two Hards, so it might be a big deciding factor.