After the tumultuous last few laps in the season opener in Bahrain, the RB F1 drivers had garnered much media attention.
Daniel Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda qualified P14 and P9 respectively for the second round of the 2024 Formula One season, under the floodlights of Jeddah. The 8-time Grand Prix winner was 0.461s slower than his teammate in Q2.
“Up until this point, no, I think we’ve definitely been close, but obviously, he [Tsunoda] did a good job, so I’m definitely not saying he didn’t, but it’s not like he’s been really comfortable and I haven’t been,” Ricciardo said.
Qualifying Head-to-head, albeit a bit early to count, is 2-0 in Tsunoda’s favour. However, Ricciardo laments not being able to step up after Q1. The Australian could only improve by 0.040s in the second segment of qualifying, with Tsunoda finding over 0.4s.
“Coming into quali, it was pretty evenly matched, and in Q1 it looked the way.
“Then he and pretty much everyone else was able to make that step, and we simply struggled.
“Before I think about the race I want to really dive into that session and see what there is because, yeah, I know that’s not the gap.”
The Australian driver talks about his previous week’s frustrations with his Friday performance, where he qualified in P14 and finished the race in P13, after RB F1 implemented team orders late in the race.
“Last week I was I was frustrated just more with myself because I knew there was time on the table.”
“Of course, the car’s never going to be perfect, but I knew last week was on me. But today is obviously a bit more of a mystery.”
Ricciardo further explains the unidentified issues he faced in Q2, and how he was not able to improve on his times, while everyone around him did.
“The balance, okay, a few corners, which, of course, you struggle a little bit here and there, but simply in Q2 when everyone’s able to find half a second or something, we just plateaued.
“I felt like I couldn’t get any more out of it with what I had. It wasn’t like I had massive understeer or oversteer, it was simply just we didn’t have the, what felt like, grip compared to the others.
“I know where the time was but I don’t know how we could have got it in that session.”
The tyre preparation troubles which seem to have affected several drivers during the qualifying session was ruled out by Ricciardo.
He states that they did “nothing too crazy” when compared to their Q1 preparation.
”Even just doing the same, you would just gain normally with track evolution and all of the simple things; you don’t even need to try harder, the lap time just comes, and it just didn’t.”
“But I don’t want to be too down,” he expressed.
However, he goes on to suggest that the car might have been damaged because of how the track has high, aggressive kerb placements.
“I mean, also this track, there’s so much load and you hit some kerbs – I don’t know, maybe there’s something that we damaged on a kerb or something.
“Let’s see. Hopeful that maybe we find something like that but, yeah, for now, a bit early to think too positively about the race.”
Daniel Ricciardo will start the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix from fourteenth on the grid.
