Daniel Ricciardo said that his AlphaTauri car lacked front-end rotation he needed at the 2023 Belgian Grand Prix.
Ricciardo started 19th and finished 16th in a challenging race for the Australian that saw him generally stuck to the back of the order, while Yuki Tsunoda brought home the team’s third point of the season.
It was Ricciardo‘s second race back in Formula 1 after replacing Nyck de Vries at the Hungarian GP and he feels that the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps might have exposed the weaknesses of the AlphaTauri more than the Hungaroring did.
“I honestly felt quite limited today in terms of pace,” Ricciardo said to the media. “I think that even in clear air we were struggling a lot.
“Just getting the front all through the middle sector, all of the high-speed corners, I was just washing and I felt like we weren’t turning the tyres on.
“I felt like I was probably just not producing enough grip and then they were sliding and overheating really quickly. I think in clear air we didn’t break away from the pack, we couldn’t.”
“So that’s probably the thing where we will try to understand what we missed.”
Some positives for AlphaTauri
Despite the challenging race, the former Red Bull man found value in completing the race and gathering data for his engineering team.
“In saying that, I’m glad again that I got the race distance, got lots to learn and lots of feedback to the team,” Ricciardo said.
On occasions AlphaTauri showed some pace, as Tsunoda was fighting for points throughout the duration and particularly when the rain started to arrive and the temperatures got cooler.
So it remains to be seen whether it was a set-up difference between the pair or if Tsunoda could just live with the problems the car has.
But Ricciardo will have a month to think about the package he is driving as F1 enters the summer break with no racing taking place until the end of August.
