Daniel Ricciardo's honest outlook on "limited" AlphaTauri

The Australian completed his second race back in Formula 1 at Spa, after returning to the Red Bull sister team a week prior in Hungary. He finished 16th in Sunday’s Grand Prix, 23 seconds off of his teammate Yuki Tsunoda in the final point scoring position. 

Despite Tsunoda’s third top 10 finish of the season, AlphaTauri find themselves bottom of the Constructor’s standings going into the four-week summer break. An overall lack of pace has been the key issue for their car in the first half of the season, which Ricciardo found out the hard way this weekend: “Honestly, I felt quite limited in terms of pace.

“Even in the clear air I was struggling a lot. It was probably not that we were turning the tyres on, it felt like probably not producing enough grip and then I was sliding and overheating really quickly.”

Ricciardo often found himself in the midst of a long DRS train that formed behind the top 10, with little chance of getting past the likes of Logan Sargeant in the Williams, which has become notoriously difficult to overtake on a straight. Alex Albon proved this at last season’s edition of Spa, finishing 10th ahead of a long train of cars.

“We were always around cars that were really quick on a straight as well, so I was watching gearboxes today”, said Ricciardo. “People have gearboxes as mantelpieces in their houses. It’s not really my thing, I don’t need to see any more!

“In clear air we didn’t break away from the back. We couldn’t! And then it felt like they were able to get more out of their tyres early.

“I was normally getting overtaken while we all had fresh tyres, and then when it settled, I’d have better pace but was stuck behind them. Obviously that’s not good for the tyres as well”.

While points will be the ultimate goal for Ricciardo going forward, his weekend wasn’t perhaps as bad as it may seem from the Grand Prix result.

A late lap time deletion in Friday’s qualifying was the reason for his Q1 exit and unfavourable grid position on Sunday, while he gave a solid account of himself through Saturday’s Sprint events. He finished in P11 in the Shootout, and ran around the top eight point scoring positions in the later sprint race, before crossing the line in tenth.

The weather along with the nature of the Sprint weekend will have no doubt hampered his chances, as he continued to adapt to his new car with just one practice session, which in turn was wet.

Ever optimistic, he looked to gain some positives going into the break: “I’m keen to get back into the truck and see what we can learn from it. I don’t want to be too discouraged, of course. 

“It was our only dry session all weekend, so it could be something simple with set-up we went the wrong way. I’m glad I got the race distance done. A lot to learn, lots of feedback to the team.

“I saw Yuki got 10th, so it looks like he had a decent race, so try to learn a bit from that as well.”