Visa Money App RB F1 Crew has come away with factors in 4 straight races, relationship again to the Miami Grand Prix. That weekend noticed each Daniel Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda end within the factors within the F1 Dash Race — a consequence Ricciardo loved deep into the afternoon in Miami, even after his struggles in qualifying for the Miami Grand Prix — and kicked off a string of fine outcomes for the workforce, together with Ricciardo’s P8 within the Canadian Grand Prix.
That streak seems headed for an finish at this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix.
Like many groups, VCARB introduced a sequence of upgrades to Barcelona, however these upgrades have but to materialize into outcomes on the observe. After a Friday that noticed each drivers in the back of the sector, the workforce hoped the information would uncover some solutions for improved lap instances on Saturday.
No such luck. Each Ricciardo and Tsunoda have been eradicated in Q1, and they’ll begin alongside one another within the ninth row on Sunday, with Tsunoda in P17 and Ricciardo in P18.
Regardless of that consequence, each drivers remained constructive of their post-qualifying feedback.
“We’ve been battling tempo this weekend and tried a number of issues to attempt to enhance, and ultimately, I felt higher in qualifying than in Free Observe. No less than I’m proud of my lap and really feel like I used to be in a position to maximise the present bundle,” mentioned Tsunoda. “The final races have been going properly and even when it’s a disgrace, I believe it’s necessary that we’re going through this tougher second collectively as a workforce. It’s a superb alternative to be taught from our struggles and develop as a workforce. A very powerful factor is to stay constructive, and we definitely will.”
Whereas the lap instances weren’t there for Ricciardo, he nonetheless believes that the workforce made progress in a single day with the setup.
“It’s a tough weekend. Now we have quite a lot of new elements on the automotive, and we nonetheless want to know the easiest way to make them work,” started Ricciardo. “After yesterday, once we have been nonetheless discovering a little bit of steadiness, we made fairly large modifications in a single day and as we speak in qualifying the automotive felt far more collectively.
“We made progress by way of feeling and steadiness, however sadly, we’re nonetheless in a tricky spot by way of the stopwatch. Being out of Q1 with each automobiles, particularly utilizing three units of soppy every, reveals that in the intervening time, we don’t have the tempo,” continued the VCARB driver. “There’s nonetheless extra to seek out and we’ll hold chipping away. Tomorrow goes to come back round fast, however we now have a couple of races forward of us with comparable observe traits, so we clearly want to determine collectively the issues we’re lacking.”
Jody Egginton, the workforce’s Technical Director, praised each drivers for his or her suggestions to the workforce. Whereas VCARB will not be proud of the outcomes in the intervening time, Egginton sounded hopeful that this weekend has laid the groundwork for additional progress over the remainder of the yr.
“When it comes to automotive steadiness, there was some enchancment,” started Egginton. “This alone has not been sufficient, so clearly, we now have quite a lot of homework to do tonight, but additionally forward of Austria, to extract extra from the automotive and a big a part of this work might be [analyzing] intimately the aero information we now have gathered right here in Barcelona.
“On the flip aspect, each drivers have finished a superb job of supporting the engineering workforce with suggestions on the quite a few take a look at gadgets we now have evaluated right here and likewise extracting the utmost from the automobiles we now have been in a position to present them with, so we now have loads of information to work with to make the mandatory steps ahead.”
