Ricciardo: I was driving with a bit more confidence in qualifying

The 31-year-old will start tomorrow's race in sixth, alongside Pierre Gasly on the third row of the grid.

Ricciardo had spoken up until this point about not quite feeling comfortable in his new car, but admitted that his first qualifying run as a McLaren driver was a step in the right direction.

"I'm still getting there," Ricciardo said after qualifying. "I feel I definitely made a step in qualifying, and even just as far as like committing on the brakes and throwing the car in, like let's say driving with a bit more confidence, I had that.

"But probably still knowing exactly what I want in this car, I can't say I'm really set on that yet. I'm somewhere in the middle. Maybe a little bit more above the middle, but I probably don't know what I like in this car as yet as a real baseline."

The Australian's new teammate Lando Norris was one spot further back in seventh and said the team were "quite happy" with the result.

"I think where we expect to be, I think we're quite happy," the 21-year-old said.

"Of course we would have been a bit happier to be ahead of both Ferraris, and both AlphaTauris, but I think throughout all of the qualifying I was sure that the AlphaTauris were quite a bit quicker than us, or just quicker than us, from the very first round we did in qualifying.

"I think we're happy to split them at least, and probably split the Ferraris too. I think we're where we expected to be. Of course everyone was thinking we were going to be heroes for some reason after yesterday, but we knew we were never going to be. So we kept focus on ourselves we didn't see the results as anything special, so we can be happy with the result today."

(Additional Reporting: Agnes Carlier).