Daniel Ricciardo was outperformed by Yuki Tsunoda in qualifying and the race at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, and he was unable to understand how his AlphaTauri team mate found a pace advantage.
AlphaTauri needed a high-scoring weekend as they chased Williams for seventh in the constructors’ standings. Tsunoda’s four points for eighth place – after spending five laps leading the race – left them three behind their rivals.
Ricciardo meanwhile qualified 15th and only spent six laps in a points position before finishing 11th. He said it had been hard to recover from his lowly starting position.
“It wasn’t a bad race,” said Ricciardo. “We had decent pace, but as soon as you get into a little dirty air, it’s hard,” said Ricciardo. “I feel like we could’ve gotten a few more points, but starting further back put us on the back foot slightly. It’s good that Yuki got some points, but we needed a little more.”
Although Ricciardo started at a disadvantage compared to his team mate, lining up nine places behind him, he had the potential for a better race had it not been for one of his brake ducts ingesting a visor tear-off, forcing him to pit early. However he downplayed the significance of that in his race result.
“I need to see how much it affected us, because I think for a two-stop [strategy], we would have probably pitted a little bit later. I don’t know if it maybe put us in a little bit of traffic or not, but I think it was not bad,” he reckoned.
“We still, I would say, recovered well and had a decent race. There’s always ifs and whats and maybes, but one more lap I think we had Stroll or certainly we would have got his DRS and had a chance at him. One lap away from a potential point, which is not too bad [given] where we started.”
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Tsunoda lost two places from his starting position, while Ricciardo climbed four spots. Ricciardo felt confident with his race pace but admitted that in qualifying he did not “quite get fully on top of it.”
Ricciardo called qualifying “kind of the Achilles’ heel” of his Brazilian and Abu Dhabi grand prix weekends, saying “I’ll take some responsibility for that, not maybe putting the best lap together.” But after qualifying last weekend he admitted the car felt show from “the moment we hit the track” and it was a mystery why he was so far off Tsunoda’s pace.
“We were quite optimistic with the new floor and a few positives we found…
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