Daniel Ricciardo’s Future in Doubt After Disappointing Qualifying And Comments From Red Bull Insider

Saajan Jogia | Aug 25, 2024

Jun 7, 2024; Montreal, Quebec, CAN; RB driver driver Daniel Ricciardo (AUS) in the pit lane during the practice session at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. Mandatory Credit: Eric Bolte-USA TODAY Sports / Eric Bolte-USA TODAY Sports

Daniel Ricciardo's 16th place qualifying for the Dutch Grand Prix has put him under pressure to perform better amid the threat of being replaced by Red Bull reserve driver Liam Lawson, who is being backed by the team's senior advisor Helmut Marko.

Ricciardo has been facing a difficult season so far, often being outperformed by his teammate Yuki Tsunoda on race weekends. The Japanese driver, who is one position above him in twelfth place in the Drivers' Standings, holding a ten-point advantage at 22 points, qualified 13th for the race at Zandvoort.

Marko made it clear in the summer break that Lawson's future within the Red Bull family will be announced in September, and with Ricciardo delivering inconsistent performance for most of the season, there is a high chance the New Zealander could be considered as his replacement in the future.

While Red Bull team principal Christian Horner clarified that Lawson won't be guaranteed a seat in Red Bull or its junior team, Ricciardo is being pushed to deliver better. Speaking about the disappointing qualifying round, the Australian driver told the media:

“It was definitely tricky out there on a windy day and with generally tough conditions.

“It was really hard to put a clean lap together in qualifying, and I just felt that I was probably struggling a little bit more than maybe some others.

“We found things in the setup [Friday] night that were encouraging coming into today, but unfortunately, we were not quick enough and just very much on a knife edge.

“I was sliding with the rear out of some turns so I had to take a bit of margin, but in doing that we were slow because I couldn’t push as much as I would have liked to, and that is where I felt I couldn’t get the lap out of it.

“Being out in Q1 doesn’t help ahead of tomorrow as it’s a narrow circuit and not one of those notorious for easily overtaking, but let’s see what happens.”

Tsunoda revealed that something changed on the car since it felt worse than the setup he had driven with the previous day during FP2. He added:

“I’m definitely disappointed, it feels like we stepped down quite a lot from FP2.

“I was happy with my lap, but for whatever reason we lacked quite a lot of pace compared to what we had.

“I thought we’d go through quite easily, but even in Q1 we struggled quite a lot, and it was pretty tight to get P10, so we’ll have to revise what happened.

“It’s not too bad of a place to start to score points, the last two days has been very inconsistent weather and we saw from last year in the race anything can happen, so I’ll try my best.”

RB technical director Jody Egginton commented on the qualifying run and the next steps for Sunday's race. He said:

“The first qualifying runs for both drivers fell below our expectations in terms of lap times, but the second ones were better.

“With some small changes to aero balance and tools settings, we made a step forward with the balance of Yuki’s car for Q2, enabling him to extract more from the tyres, but even with this step and the final lap looking very strong, we were missing just over 0.1sec in the final corners.

“It was an incredibly packed Q2 session, of course we will review if another step in the direction taken for Q2 could have helped as every small detail matters when qualifying lap times are so close.

“Looking ahead to tomorrow, FP2 long run pace was reasonable, so if we can get our cars moving forwards early towards the ones in front of us, we should be able to find ourselves at the front of the midfield and take any opportunities that present themselves.”