Red Bull admits to outright lack of pace
Red Bull RAcing had a disappointing qualifying session in Austria with Daniel Ricciardo 5th fastest and Sebastian Vettel failing to get through to Q3 with a 13th fastest time.
Daniel Ricciardo, 5th: “It was tough out there. It’s been tough all weekend to be honest and it’s felt like we’ve had to squeeze everything out of the car to get into the top 5, which we just managed to do today. All weekend we’ve been on the back foot and I think respect to the other teams, they managed to get their cars dialled in well for this weekend and we’ve just got to keep pushing. Fifth was the best we could have done in that session today.”
Sebastian Vettel, 13th: “There were no real problems today, other than that we weren’t quick enough. Daniel was quicker in Turn 5 and has been quicker in Turn 2 all weekend. We’ll see how it goes for the race; it should be hotter tomorrow and hopefully we can make a big step and take on some of the other cars.”
Christian Horner, Team Principal: “I think P5 was the maximum we were going to get out of today with Daniel, who extracted everything he could from the car, in what was a difficult qualifying session for us. Sebastian struggled to generate the pace over a single lap and it was obviously disappointing not to make it through into Q3. More encouragingly, our race pace looks better and hopefully if temperatures increase, we’ll be pushing to make a lot of headway tomorrow in front of Red Bull’s home crowd.”
Thierry Salvi, Renault Engines Track Support Engineer: “It was a hard exercise today with the lap times again very close at the end of Q2, plus in Q3. As in Montreal every little detail can make the difference. Seb missed out on Q3 for just half a tenth: we will review every setting now to try to understand where we could have extracted the missing power. Daniel was faster today and did a great job to get his car close to the front row. Let’s see tomorrow during the race as a lot can happen.”
