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Formula 1 Mexican GP
Ricciardo “confused, annoyed, helpless” after dismal Mexico qualifying
Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo says he feels mystified over his sudden loss of pace after qualifying down in seventh position for the Mexican Grand Prix.
Charles Bradley
Edited: Oct 28, 2017, 8:23 PM
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While his teammate Max Verstappen came within 0.086s of pole position, Ricciardo was almost a second off his pace – and even beaten to a top-six spot by Force India’s Esteban Ocon. He failed to match his own FP3 time by a tenth, and was only 0.019s faster than Renault’s Nico Hulkenberg in Q3.
“I topped practice yesterday, and having the same settings this morning, we were pretty much on P1 pace,” said Ricciardo. “We haven’t touched the car from yesterday to today, up to qualifying, and from the start of the session it was just… nowhere.
“We tried doing two warm-up laps, one warm-up lap. But it seemed like whatever grip I had when I left the box, I had for the session.
“We played around a bit with front wing, but the car was numb to anything in qualifying. In the end we couldn’t do anything, I was pretty helpless. We need to understand why. We’re seventh when we’ve been fighting towards the front all weekend.
“If we get back to the car we had, I think we can still race up to the podium tomorrow. But qualifying was… what’s a word without swearing? We were very confused, annoyed, helpless.”
When pushed on the cause of the problem, he replied: “It seems like something fundamental and I don’t know now what that is. The feeling was like you don’t have tyre blankets, going out and sliding everywhere, can’t generate the grip you require.
“Sometimes you get one set of tyres you can't turn on, so you might lose a bit of time, but every run was the same story, so super, super frustrated, confused. I'm sure we'll find something, but it doesn't make the session any easier to go through. We couldn't really do anything.
“This morning the track was really cold, and we were still able to hit it on the first lap. So this afternoon [as it was warmer] it should have been a breeze to warm the tyres up and to get them going.
"That's where it's more confusing right now; that doesn't really explain the problems we had – if anything that should have helped the warm-up.
“The adrenaline is slowly coming down now. I wasn't... for sure angry, but just helpless, helpless in that qualifying.”
Additional reporting by Glenn Freeman
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