Daniel Ricciardo was hoping to get a good number of laps under his belt during free practice in Barcelona today, especially after the Baku debacle.
However, the Australian couldn’t manage to keep his car on the track in FP1, running off the track on Turn 4 and sitting out the last half hour of the session.
The crash wasn’t a technical or a driver error but was caused by high winds.
“There were a few of us making a few errors unfortunately mine was costly enough to miss the last hour of that session,” Ricciardo said. “But tailwind is a big one in F1.
“Any corners with a tailwind you lose a lot of rear grip. Into Turn 4 that was a tough one because there was a tailwind and it is a corner where you have to drive into it with the brake, so you load up the front and unload the rear. It is a bad corner to have a tailwind as it makes it tricky. It caught me out this morning.” Ricciardo said.
Ricciardo though had a very fruitful FP2, ending it just behind Hamilton, who was driving pretty smoothly today.
Ricciardo though wasn’t quite convinced with how the supersoft tyres behaved in free practice and felt that maybe soft tyres would be the way to go on race day.
“The front tyres don’t really seem like they are working well with these conditions,” Ricciardo said.
“A lot of understeer and wasn’t able to come back but on high fuel it was a bit better.
“Then we put the softs on and it was a lot quicker. So the Supersoft, unless something changes, it doesn’t look like a nice tyre this weekend. The front tyres seemed, I don’t know if it is the conditions, but didn’t seem like it was working. The soft was faster today and even the medium was not too slow so it creates some options for the race which is nice.” he concluded.
