Daniel Ricciardo is bemused by his failure to score a strong result over the first three races of 2024.
The veteran RB racer is one of seven drivers yet to score their first point of the year. He scored his best finish, 12th, at the last race in Melbourne, having failed to progress beyond Q1 in qualifying.
His team mate Yuki Tsunoda scored RB’s first points of the season last time out in Australia in seventh. Ricciardo has only finished ahead of him once in the opening three rounds, at the first race of the season in Bahrain. On that occasion, Tsunoda was asked to move over for Ricciardo towards the end of that race as they were running different strategies.
However Ricciardo insists he is feeling confident and comfortable in his new car for 2024. “It’s funny because, on paper, it hasn’t been good,” he told the official F1 channel. “I know obviously that as well the results haven’t been what I wanted, but personally and the confidence and the happiness and all of that is really unchanged.
“It’s really just a matter now of getting a result and putting a few things to rest. But internally and the place I’m in, personally, I feel really good. And that’s why it’s probably been a little bit weird to comprehend why the result hasn’t happened yet. But otherwise feeling good.”
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Ricciardo said he does not have any major difficulties with his car and that he has put considerable time into studying his data with his team.
“We’ve been putting a lot of work in off-track as well in the off weeks and trying to understand how much is me, how much is the car, what is it that maybe the car’s not giving me that I’m looking for and things like this,” he explained. “It’s really just small things here and there.
“I think what’s important now is, again, because we’re not in a place where we’re lost or I don’t feel good, I think it’s important for us just to focus on sitting down with my engineers and that’s it. We don’t start receiving suggestions from other people and ‘have you thought about this or do that’ because then you go down a rabbit hole that we’re certainly not willing already to go down.
“So it’s just really staying the course. Obviously it is frustrating, because I do want the results and I feel very prepared and I feel like I’m ready to get results. But we can’t get side-tracked by anything else, really.”
Ricciardo said he spent some time with…
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