Ricciardo’s fights are exaggerated by grippy F1 tracks

The Australian had difficult weekends in Imola and Portimao and was unable to reach teammate Lando Norris.

But the contrast was huge during qualifying for the Portuguese Grand Prix when Ricciardo was kicked out of Q1 for lack of confidence to push his McLaren the way he wanted. He starts from 16th place on the grid.

McLaren realizes that Ricciardo simply doesn’t miss any mileage in the car, and he believes the distances between him and Norris look bigger because slippery track surfaces reveal any trepidation in the car.

Seidl said: “I think in the end it’s the little things that are likely to be exaggerated in poor grip conditions, as we have here and as we had it in Imola with the drying track.

“We have in the. seen [Friday] Practice lesson, that [the Q1 exit] is definitely not the gap he has with Lando at the moment. He was just trying to put the lap together and it’s not easy to do the laps here with the traffic, the wind and all the bad grip conditions.

“We just have to stay calm, analyze, work through, and I’m sure it will come.”

Daniel Ricciardo, McLaren, is interviewed after qualifying

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Ricciardo said he was still in the process of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the McLaren package and said he couldn’t fall back on some old techniques he’d used in the past to get more lap times.

For example, a previous trait of bringing more speed to the apex doesn’t work on routes with low grip, as it often just causes the car to slide more.

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“I’m still trying to exploit the car’s strengths, but also bypassing the weaknesses,” he said. “There are things that I used to do in order, let’s say, to get into a corner faster that might not work now. It could tip it over the edge, so to speak.

“So it’s fine-tuning everything: how you turn in, how you brake and all that. But yeah, I’m sure it’s different. But at the end of the day, as every F1 car will be different, it’s up to me to adapt. “

Ricciardo said in the longer term he could help McLaren steer the car in a direction that suited him better, but for now he has to sort things out himself.

“I can give them feedback and tell them, ‘OK, I think it can get better and we should try to develop the car at this stage,'” said Ricciardo. “But at the end of the day it is obvious what it is.

“So I just have to adjust a little. I felt like it was going to get better this weekend. I felt that Friday was a step in the right direction and of course qualifying was probably not, I would say, the true picture of how the weekend had gone. And of course that makes it even more disappointing. ”