Renault’s Daniel Ricciardo says he and the team aren’t yet quite sure where they stand compared to their immediate rivals after running a conservative first week.
While the Renault team finished off the first week of testing by claiming the top of the timesheets with Nico Hulkenberg on Day 4 and Daniel Ricciardo in P3 after the morning session, there’s still a sense from Renault that they haven’t quite figured out where they stand yet. This is a view shared by Daniel Ricciardo as well, who says the team are yet to turn up the dial and unlock the full pace of their RS19.
“We’re still running quite conservatively.” he said during the first week of testing. “We’re not quite at race-spec yet. Hard to say if it’s better or worse yet but I’ve been told that we’re not in that mode yet.”
“From a competitive feeling, I genuinely don’t know where we stand.”
With the Australian driver joining Renault after five seasons of driving for Red Bull Racing, an established frontrunning team, he was asked whether he felt Renault weren’t quite in RBR’s league when it came to pre-season preparations: “In terms of a working environment, the debriefs, what we go through with engineers coming to me for feedback…from an analysis point of view, we’re not leaving any stone unturned. There’s a lot of attention to detail and a lot of stuff which is promising from an ambitious point of view.”
“I don’t feel that I go, “Well, at Red Bull, we did this, this and this” and we’re only doing one of those things. We’re ticking all the boxes and trying to get better.”
As many of the teams are doing for Test 2, Ricciardo will be on duty every day as he shares the RS19 with Nico Hulkenberg throughout the final four days of pre-season preparation.
