Ricciardo ‘95% comfortable’ on F1 return: ‘It felt like I never really left’
After the first practice session was hit with rain, the second session was more representative of Ricciardo’s pace relative to teammate Yuki Tsunoda.
Ricciardo was 14th fastest in FP2, just over 0.4s off Tsunoda’s best time which put him an impressive fourth in the timesheets.
This weekend marks Ricciardo’s first F1 race since the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in November 2022.
Speaking to the media after practice on Friday, he said: “I felt comfortable quite quickly today, but comfortable is 95%. The last few percent, look, right now, I feel I can find that tomorrow. At least get close to it.
“Today, I didn’t quite put the lap together, but I started to feel the limit of the car. Just keep it clean tomorrow, and I feel like I’ll be pretty content.”
Ricciardo admitted he needs to find more time on the soft tyre after he was able to match Tsunoda initially on the mediums.
“Look, positions, it’s probably not too relevant at the moment,” he added. “I think it was just more for me today to feel basically where I am with the car. It all felt pretty familiar. Obviously there’s a lot of outside attention, but once I put the helmet on and got in the car, it felt, in a way, like I never really left, so that was nice.
“And obviously this morning, we didn’t really get anything. But this afternoon, I think yeah, just a little bit on the new tire, but nothing really I’m concerned about. The car felt OK. Yeah, to be honest, doesn’t feel too bad. A bit of work tonight, but nothing crazy.
“Look, a bit more out of me, and for sure there’s some things already I feel in the car that we can try and work on. Right now, I’m quite optimistic. It looked like Yuki as well had a pretty good day. I think if we put all these things together, maybe tomorrow we can do OK.”
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