Ricciardo: I had hoped for more

It was always going to be a tough call: stay at Red Bull and play second fiddle to Max Verstappen, or move to Renault to spearhead a team with a winning pedigree, albeit over a decade ago, and packed with ambition.

But predictions by team boss Cyril Abiteboul that podiums are on the cards this year, his backroom team have produced a below-par chassis, they trail customer team McLaren and are anything between 0.8 of a second to 1.5 seconds shy of the pacesetters.

Needless to say, on the back of a disappointing 'first-half' the summer break was a welcome relief for Ricciardo's team, as he revealed in an interview with Racer, “I think the break’s come at a good time.

"As a team, we can have some time off, reset… I think we can definitely do better, and I believe we will, so I’m actually happy to have some time off now and I’m very confident for the second half of the season that we can turn it around.

“Whether we close the gap in the points or not, time will tell, but I definitely believe we can have a strong second half of the season and make the things that should have happened earlier… make them happen and then move into 2020 with a lot of momentum.”

Renault, under Abiteboul, are not shy to trumpet achievements that only they seem privy to and which underplay their reality, which is, that they are nowhere near podium contention in terms of the current pecking order. Some drastic DNFs would have to occur in races for the Aussie or his German teammate to make it onto the podium.

In contrast, expectations were vastly higher before engines fired up in anger, but Ricciardo is not keen to dwell on the negatives, “I had hoped for more but I knew it was not going to happen [fast], so if I look at Canada qualifying, I actually said that exceeded some expectations in the first few races.

In Montreal, Ricciardo qualified fourth and only eight tenths down on the pole-winning time set by Sebastian Vettel in the Ferrari. Closest they have been to the benchmark pace all year.

But then a few weeks later, at Red Bull Ring they were 1.5 seconds down on the top time, way out of the top ten, "Some other races like Austria were lower than our expectations. So we’ve bounced around in between everything, really. But at this halfway point we could say alright, we need to do better.

“If we want to be on target for podiums in 2020, we need to start making bigger steps for the second half of the year. So up until now I am somewhere in the middle with expectations, but I’d now expect the second half of the season to have some more regular top-six finishes," added Ricciardo.

Meanwhile, at his former Red Bull team, Max Verstappen and Honda have found a sweetspot and are winning races. When he decided to sign for Renault, Ricciardo was unsure that the new partnership would be winning during the first season of the partnership.

But they are, and ironically, Red Bull are sorely miss a second race-winning and capable driver which Ricciardo is.

It was always a big risk to ditch a winning environment for wannabe upstarts, which Renault are in the Abiteboul era - a works for team with substantial resources who are nowhere near the Top Three in the top flight.

Instead, on Grand Prix weekends their drivers are sent to a gunfight with a knife and an unreliable one to boot.

Credit to Ricciardo for keeping the faith and belief that Renault will find the elusive magic button that has dodged them since Fernando Alonso won the 2008 Japanese Grand Prix for the marque.

https://www.grandprix247.com/2019/03/25/abiteboul-disappointed-our-car-is-not-top-of-the-midfield/