RB F1 faced a challenging Bahrain GP, falling short of expectations despite Ricciardo’s cautious optimism, landing in 13th and 14th.
RB F1 likely hoped for a better outcome from the Bahrain Grand Prix, despite Daniel Ricciardo’s caution in recent weeks. The team could only manage 13th and 14th positions.
“Overall, a tough Saturday where the midfield was tighter than ever. The fight for 11th place was fierce with eight cars sometimes involved!” stated Laurent Mekies, the team’s director.
“At the start of the race, we thought we could have a good run, with Yuki doing a great job and moving up to 10th place. We lost a few positions during the race and struggled to overtake our competitors in the last stage of the race.”
“We had Daniel on a new set of soft tires for this last stint and we swapped our cars to give us a chance to pass Kevin (Magnussen) and Zhou (Guanyu), but ultimately it wasn’t enough, and we had to settle for 13th and 14th places.”
“We know it’s only the first race, but we’re certainly going to review how we could have gotten more from our car and our pace. There are more positives than negatives from our first weekend, and everyone is making a big effort in Faenza and Bicester. Every hundredth of a second gained in the heart of the pack will make a significant difference.”
“We leave Bahrain disappointed”
Jody Egginton, the team’s technical director, acknowledges he had hoped for more from this opening round: “A frustrating race in many ways. We need to look at the data and review points in the race where we might have taken advantage of our closest competitors.”
“Daniel was having some trouble with the balance of his car during the first two stints, and we need to understand the factors that influence this. Daniel made good use of his soft tires in the last stint to catch up with the group ahead of him, but overtaking was not easy and he ran out of laps to make progress.”
“Yuki’s F1 balance was better and his pace seemed quite reasonable in the early stages of the race, he was doing well in his group of cars and was taking good care of his tires. However, we need to review in detail the middle phase of the race, including how Lance (Stroll) and Zhou (Guanyu) managed to take advantage in the laps following the last stop, which cost us a few track positions that we couldn’t recover in the last part of the race, thus missing the opportunity to fight for 10th place.”
“In summary, the weekend was solid, with a package capable of performing reasonably well in the midfield battle, but we can’t help but feel that we failed to extract everything from the race. We therefore leave Bahrain disappointed.”
“There’s a lot of work to do ahead of next week’s race in Saudi Arabia, but at the same time, as it comes so early, we also have the opportunity to react and quickly apply the lessons we’ve learned from this event.”
RB F1 Bahrain Outcome. RB F1 Bahrain Outcome
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