Daniel Ricciardo believes strategy can enable him to recover from a disappointing 10th on the grid for Sunday’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
After his Red Bull team set the pace on Friday, Saturday proved more difficult for the Milton Keynes-based team with Ricciardo hitting the wall while on a flying lap in Q3, causing a red flag and then falling down the order as others improved on their last run.
Explaining what happened, the Australian commented: “I was just trying to carry a bit of speed through that combination and I felt, through Turn 6, the rear kind of went away a little bit. It happened so quickly.
“I tried to power through it but the wall comes back on you and the rear was gone so as soon as I hit it I felt it was too big of a hit.”
“I could see the rim was damaged, so the consequence of trying to get a bit more out of it in Q3,” he added accepting blame for the incident. “I felt like the track temperature is coming down and the track is getting better, so there is margin, particularly in Q3 to improve.
“I was chasing that little bit too much. A bit frustrated of course but not really anything to blame other than trying.”
Looking forward to the race, however, the long run pace Red Bull showed on Friday is something positive for Ricciardo to build on with the 27-year-old also sensing a scenario to repeat what worked for him very well a month ago.
“Strategy is limited but you could find not the same but a similar situation to Monaco where perhaps an overcut is not that far off an undercut,” he claimed.
“So strategy might not be that straight forward, there might be some opportunities there. And then if I am quicker than the guys in front, you can overtake. With such a long straight, even if we are down, say to a Mercedes, Force India or Williams, the cars in front of me, if you get a tow then the tow is bigger than the horsepower deficit.”
“So if we are quicker we should be able to overtake. So try and be quick and make an under or overcut work. It sounds easy.”
Across the garage, Max Verstappen was left to rue several niggly problems as he fell behind the two Ferraris on the final flying lap into fifth.
“By having a bit more wheel spin than usual I lost gear sync so all the way up through the castle and then the long straight I was having very hard shifts so I lost more or less two-tenths because of it,” the Dutchman explained.
“Today that cost me P3,” he added. “We should be ahead [of Ferrari] without all things happening in qualifying so yeah it’s looking a lot better, but of course when you’re looking to Mercedes we know we have to improve but we know they have this power mode which they can use.”