Daniel Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda enjoy ‘decent’ start to Azerbaijan Grand Prix

After the first two practice sessions ahead of the Formula 1 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Yuki Tsunoda, and Daniel Ricciardo have some reasons to believe they could be in the fight over the weekend.

However, there are also some areas of concern.

Tsunoda finished P15 in the first practice session on Friday, improving slightly to P11 in the day’s second session. For Ricciardo, the results were reversed. The Australian driver finished up in tenth in FP1, only to slide back to P16 in FP2.

Both drivers saw some silver lining on the day.

“It started pretty tricky, but we made good progress between FP1 and FP2, just not quite enough to be in the top of the midfield,” said Tsunoda in the team’s post-session report. “It’s difficult on this kind of track to have nice balance everywhere, but we managed to improve session by session, we just need to work on some fine tuning and fix the bouncing I experienced in FP2. We have a couple of ideas already on how we can improve before FP3 tomorrow, to turn it around for a good qualifying.”

As for Ricciardo, he looked at FP1 as the bright spot.

“Today was mixed. FP1 went well, it was nice to get back on this circuit, it’s been a couple of years since I last drove here. I felt like I got into the flow of it relatively well and felt good. We made some changes for FP2 to see if we could improve grip, as it’s very slippery here. However, we didn’t feel the conclusion of this enhanced things,” said Ricciardo. “We know what worked this morning and was in a good position, so if we use our FP1 set up and try to get a little bit more out of it, we’ll be fighting towards the front of the mid-field with a good lap in qualifying tomorrow. Like any street circuit, if you can put the lap together you can go very well. We’ll try our best to make it work.”

Racing Director Alan Permane called the day “decent,” but pointed to some areas of improvement the team can focus on for Saturday and ultimately, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

“A decent day for us although still plenty of pace to find, as the car balance was not quite perfect. It meant that neither driver was fully happy. We carried out our floor comparison with Daniel running the latest spec in FP1 and both cars running it in FP2 and we will continue analysing the data this evening,” said Permane.

“The initial impression is that it’s a decent step in the right direction. As usual at this street circuit, the track evolves throughout the day and that involves adjusting the balance to follow the improvement,” added the VCARB Racing Director. “Tonight, we will look carefully at our level of downforce and we might adjust that for FP3 and possibly into qualifying.”