In Austin the AlphaTauri driver had suffered from a very challenging return to racing after the hand injury he had picked up in Zandvoort, as he ended the race in last place a lap down, picking up damage during the Grand Prix.
However, Mexico has been much sweeter for the former McLaren driver, as he managed to put his AT04 in fourth place during qualifying. Consistently fast in all segments of the grid setting session, Ricciardo will line up next to his former teammate Max Verstappen.
His lap time was only 0.216s off Charles Leclerc’s pole, another reason to feel delighted for the experienced driver in his 13th Formula 1 season.
“There’s lots of good energy right now, I just want to rip my shirt off! Look, I’m very happy with P4, it’s an amazing result for us as a team. So on the one hand, I think the result is crazy – but already from yesterday, even from the first lap, I just had a lot of good feelings in the car.
“Obviously P4 is amazing, but then when you look at pole, it was two-tenths, it’s not like Max or someone was seven or eight-tenths down the road. So the gap is just as cool as the position, if you know what I mean.”
The 8-time Grand Prix winner was very pleased with his performance, and admitted he was expecting a very positive day due to his good feeling with the track since opening practice.
“Already kind of before the weekend I was feeling a little bit hungry, let’s say? In a positive way, like a chip on my shoulder, and from Lap 1 yesterday, I felt good. Really all weekend I think we were well inside the top 10 car.”
“I think this morning, we were still there in P9. But obviously I was not happy with my lap this morning. I knew that we could show more than that,” he added, recalling the earlier FP3 session.
Photo credit: Scuderia AlphaTauri
Ricciardo was especially impressed by the fact that his best attempt in Q3 hadn’t been given help via a tow, as his teammate Yuki Tsunoda will start from P19.
“Q1, Q2, Yuki was great and gave us a tow just to make sure that we got into Q3. But then Q3, we didn’t have a tow and we still showed really good pace. Probably the coolest thing about today was it wasn’t ‘ah OK, they did it but they gained a couple of tenths from a tow’. We had raw pace.”
The Perth-born driver, who has signed with AlphaTauri for the 2024 season as well, is confident that the great Saturday performance can be repeated on Sunday, allowing him to score his first points for the Italian Scuderia:
“We’re really there, and who knows what it means for tomorrow? I don’t feel today is a fluke. I really feel like we had strong pace.”
Ricciardo knows that tomorrow he will be surrounded by top cars that won’t make his life, or finishing in the top 5, easy, but is still excited for an opportunity to bag some big points as AlphaTauri look to overtake Haas in the championship.
“You would expect the top teams to maybe show a little bit more on long runs. But personally, I feel great in the car, I feel confident, so I’ll put up a fight and if we’re here, P4 or somewhere around there tomorrow, I think we’ll be pretty happy.
“I felt with a perfect lap, going through it in my head last night, I thought maybe today we could be P6, P7 if everything goes well. I definitely had confidence we weren’t just a P10 car. But P4 is pretty cool.
“Obviously today is half the job. We’ll focus on tomorrow in an hour or so, but in the next hour, we’ll enjoy this and it feels very, very nice.”
“I’m still keeping that fire in the belly for tomorrow,” he concluded, hyping himself up for the tough challenge that he will have to face on Sunday.
