Daniel Ricciardo fear of F1 axe? Drab Dutch GP qualifying piles pressure on

A sub-par qualifying run at the F1 Dutch Grand Prix has piled pressure on Daniel Ricciardo as he bids to keep his race seat.

Ricciardo entered this weekend with claims from Red Bull’s Helmut Marko ringing in his ears that Liam Lawson is guaranteed a race seat in F1.

Ricciardo - as the only Red Bull or RB driver without a contract for 2025 yet - was seemingly most at-risk.

Christian Horner moved to clarify Red Bull’s stance on Lawson - insisting he was not necessarily guaranteed a drive in one of their cars, or their sister team’s.

But nevertheless, Ricciardo remains under scrutiny.

He qualified 16th for the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, three places behind teammate Yuki Tsunoda.

“It was definitely tricky out there on a windy day and with generally tough conditions,” Ricciardo reacted to qualifying.

“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, who will start from 13th, said after qualifying: “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 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.”