Daniel Ricciardo fears Renault hasn't taken a big enough step forward with their upgrades for the Spanish Grand Prix.

The Enstone-based outfit is in need of a boost after a difficult start to the season and with the start of the development race, expectations are the team should get stronger.

However, after a reasonable P10 and P11 in the morning, when the pace increased in the afternoon, Ricciardo and teammate Nico Hulkenberg dropped four places.

“I think the one lap performance today wasn’t good enough," the Australian declared. "The long runs were more competitive, but I think [our rivals] looked relatively quite a lot stronger in the short runs."

To make matters worse, Ricciardo admitted Renault was struggling to extract performance from their Barcelona upgrades.

“The first run this morning actually, I felt pretty good with the car, and I felt like the updates worked quite well. Then we hit a little bit of stalemate I guess and we didn’t really progress that much more through the day," he revealed.

“I think we’ve got to go back and see what we changed from the first run, and take a few steps back and figure it out.

“I certainly felt some positives today, even though the end result doesn’t look like that. We’ve just got to make sure we put it together on one lap in particular tomorrow.”

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Do that and Ricciardo, who will take a three-place grid drop regardless after his Baku crash, does see room for optimism.

“I think we can still be in Q3. I think we were 15th today, so we’re not close today, but I really think the car is good enough to be in Q3," he stated.

“I’m still confident we can get it right for tomorrow.”