After a big step up in China, is Ricciardo finally on the road to recovery?
Daniel Ricciardo arrived in China with his back against the wall.
He’d gone four grands prix being beaten handily by younger teammate Yuki Tsunoda.
At the previous race in Japan he’d been wiped out on the first lap in a clumsy crash with Alex Albon.
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As the sport settled in Shanghai, Helmut Marko had hinted to the Austrian media that he’d be keen to see reserve driver Liam Lawson at RB before the end of the season.
Ricciardo, however, remained steadfast, insisting that he wasn’t feeling the heat.
“The last time we were here, 2019, was the race that kickstarted everything with my Renault campaign,” he said on Thursday. “We struggled the first few races and then came here and found something, and that was really positive I think from that race onwards for us.
“I’d love to replicate that five years later.”
The early evidence suggests Ricciardo might be finally recapturing that magic.
The Chinese Grand Prix was comfortably the Aussie’s most convincing weekend of the season.
He outqualified Tsunoda in both qualifying sessions and finished ahead of him in the sprint. He was ahead of his teammate in the grand prix too before both were punted out of the race within a lap of each other.
The strength of his Shanghai performance undoubtedly played into his immense frustration for having had his car destroyed by an inattentive Lance Stroll.
But China left the Ricciardo story with as many questions as answers as the crucial European leg of the season fast approaches.
PIT TALK PODCAST: Daniel Ricciardo enjoyed his most convincing weekend of the year in China — until he was punted out of the race by Lance Stroll anyway. What was behind the upturn in form, and is it sustainable?
HOW BIG A STEP WAS THIS WEEKEND?
Ricciardo’s season up to China hadn’t been quite as bad as some had made it out to be.
In race conditions he’s been a match for Tsunoda. While race pace is difficult to distil and compare perfectly, rough calculations put him at least on par, if not marginally ahead, of the Japanese gun.
It’s qualifying, however, where he was letting himself down.
Up to an including the Japanese Grand Prix Ricciardo had been an average of 0.194 seconds off his teammate’s pace, excluding his deleted lap in Melbourne.
It’s not much — in fact on current comparisons it would make the RB teammates the fifth closest on the grid — but Ricciardo wasn’t given his RB lifeline to qualify a couple of tenths behind a younger driver.
The eight-time race winner was expected to achieve much, much more.
“The demand on him was that he clearly had to be faster than Yuki,” Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko told Kleine Zeitung. “This has not been the case so far.”
China was far more in line with that expectation.
Comparing their SQ1/Q1 times — Tsunoda was eliminated in the bottom five on both days — in sprint qualifying Ricciardo was a whopping 0.571 seconds quicker than Tsunoda. In qualifying for the grand prix the margin was reduced to a still decisive 0.303 seconds.
Ricciardo’s qualifying form — Tsunoda comparison
China sprint: 0.571 seconds ahead
Chinese Grand Prix: 0.303 seconds ahead
Grand prix average: 0.094 seconds behind
The stats in focus make for even better reading.
His best time in sprint qualifying was only 0.99 per cent slower than Verstappen’s fastest time — this being in SQ2, before the rain slowed everyone down — which is the closest he’s been all year to the ultimate pace.
The same metric in grand prix qualifying had him 1.36 per cent off the pace, the closest he’s been since the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix.
His average deficit before China had been 1.58 per cent, or 1.424 seconds over a normalised 90-second lap.
Ricciardo’s qualifying form — normalised 90-second lap
Before China: +1.424 seconds
China sprint: +0.947 seconds
Chinese Grand Prix: +1.224 seconds
His race performances were also an improvement. Having finished behind Tsunoda in every race since Bahrain, he beat his teammate by five places in the sprint, and on Sunday he’d just overtaken the young gun after the first pit stops before the safety car interrupted the day.
WAS IT ALL IN THE CHASSIS?
There was a clear uptick in the West Australian’s performance in Shanghai. The question is whether the introduction of a new chassis was the cause or a coincidence.
The chassis isn’t a performance part. It’s carbon fibre tub to which the performance parts are attached.
However, unseen damage or unknown defects can have a negative effect on a car’s performance by making the chassis flex more than it should. This type of flexing can be accounted for through set-up changes up to a point, but even so a driver can still be left feeling off, sensitive as they are to tiny behaviour changes in their machinery.
It might make a difference of only a few tenths, but that’s all it’s taken for Ricciardo to fall behind Tsunoda.
But RB said before China that it expected the chassis to make no difference. There were no signs Ricciardo’s old tub had problems, and he was getting his hands on the new one only because the third chassis was set to be entered into rotation anyway. Given his struggles, he may as well have been the one to get it.
Ricciardo himself said on Saturday night that pointing to the chassis would be too easy and answer, though he said the improvement was undeniable.
“I don’t want to jump on that yet and be like, ‘It’s definitely that’,” he said, per The Race. “Whether it’s that or whether it’s just that I’ve always done well around here, we’ll see.”
Ricciardo’s record in China is a good one. Throughout his entire career he’s been outqualified by teammate only once and beaten in a race just three times. This year was the first time he’d ever retired from a race in Shanghai.
To pin it all on the chassis also ignores that Ricciardo was already making improvements to his qualifying form before this weekend, having been beaten by Tsunoda to a place in the top 10 in Japan by just 0.055 seconds, less than his current season-average deficit of 0.179 seconds.
But still, Ricciardo had been willing to contemplate the chassis as being part of his problem before China, and while he admitted the results weren’t yet conclusive, he’s willing to buy that the swap could end up forming part of the solution.
“From the get-go we just felt like we’re in a better place,” he said. “It came a bit more seamlessly so far this weekend, so it’s encouraging.
“We’ll see in Miami and in Imola and maybe the next few if it continues.”
TSUNODA GIVES REASONS FOR CAUTION
But for all the positivity around Ricciardo’s Chinese Grand Prix form, there is one big reason for caution.
Tsunoda clearly underperformed at the weekend, making him an unreliable bar against which to measure Ricciardo’s improvements.
Yuki was nowhere all weekend.
The Japanese driver had qualified inside the top 10 for three grands prix in a row before China. He bombed out of both Shanghai qualifying sessions in 19th.
He was so slow that he was well outside his performance envelope in both sessions.
On average he was 2.31 per cent slower than the quickest times in China, which is well down on his average 1.18 per cent deficit over the first four rounds of the season.
Over a normalised 90-second lap that represents a 1.018-second blowout.
There are a few possible explanations for Tsunoda’s drop-off.
This was the 23-year-old’s first visit to the Shanghai International Circuit, meaning he had an experience deficit to Ricciardo’s eight China entries.
The sprint weekend also left him with just one practice session to acclimatise to the circuit and the conditions. The task was made harder by the unusual bitumen treatment to the track surface, which had been applied by race organisers without telling the teams or the FIA.
This also appeared to be a track that didn’t play to RB’s strengths. Of the five tracks the sport has visited so far, this was the second worst for the Faenza team after Suzuka in terms of the gap to the front by pure pace.
Most interesting, however, is that after qualifying 19th for the grand prix, Tsunoda’s downbeat summaries sounded very similar to Ricciardo’s disappointments earlier in the year.
“I was pretty happy with my driving and I was still nowhere,” Tsunoda said after qualifying. “I’ve been struggling all week with the rear, and still whatever we do, it’s the same.
“We had pretty good confidence going into qualifying that we’d found a good answer to execute our package, but we’re just still nowhere.
“It’s pretty frustrating, but at the same time at least for myself I gave it a good effort.”
After the race he revealed the brief time spent racing Ricciardo as their strategies crossed paths had been valuable for him.
“Compared to even my teammate, when we were driving together, it was quite a lot different,” he said. “This week overall I haven’t been able to show proper performance.”
It sounds almost worryingly similar to Ricciardo’s lamentations in Melbourne that the car felt good but was for some reason inherently too slow to match Tsunoda’s times.
It could suggest that the RB has a narrower, murkier performance window than first thought. Ricciardo had clearly struggled to find it earlier; perhaps now Tsunoda has fallen out of the sweet spot.
It’s impossible to distil all these factors into once clear answer. There are too many competing variables.
It’ll take several more races to reach any conclusion on whether the Chinese Grand Prix was the first step of Ricciardo’s recovery or just a false dawn.
Miami is another sprint weekend at an unusual track, but after that the sport will settle into some crucial races in Europe and Canada, where Ricciardo will be expected to hit his stride.
What we can say for certain is that he felt like this weekend was better for him.
While we can’t quantify what that means specifically, it is at least a positive in the Aussie’s quest to resuscitate his Formula 1 career.