- Red Bull
Longer stints need work - Ricciardo
Daniel Ricciardo admits Red Bull has work to do on its longer stints in Malaysia if it wants to build on his encouraging start to life with the team.
Ricciardo is still yet to find out whether his disqualification from Melbourne will be upheld but he impressed with the drive nonetheless, and Red Bull continued to show signs of improvement on Friday practice in Malaysia. Ricciardo finished seventh, while Vettel impressed by going third, but Ricciardo admits he knows the team has work to do before the race on Sunday.
"On the short run stuff we are more or less where we expected to be, I'm not too concerned about that," he said. "I was pretty pleased with the short run stuff, actually. But the long run stuff I wasn't that pleased with so we need to have a look at that. Generally it was a good day, we did lots of laps which is important. The short run pace we learnt quite a lot about. This morning we were a little bit off the pace but I'm pretty pleased with the progress we made. I think we've got some room for improvement. That's what tonight is for, to learn and try and get on with it."
There were rumours Red Bull suffered further fuel-flow sensor problems on Friday, the issue surrounding his Melbourne disqualification, but Ricciardo refused to be drawn into a comment about it when questioned.
"Someone told me so, I didn't actually know to be honest. If we did have something like that the team is probably aware not to tell me! I just drive."
Ricciardo ran wide in the final seconds of FP2 at Turn 11, but he admits he does not expect grip to be too much of an issue for the race.
"We came here and there was a lot of rubber on the track before us. I'm not 100% sure what rubber it was and I don't know if it helps us or not. It was very grippy but in fact there's still a few low grip areas. Turn 11 is quite tricky. You exit out of nine, ten, and you hit always come quite close to the exit kerb on the entry and I just got a little bit too close. Better today than tomorrow, though. The humidity is the biggest challenge about this place but it's all good. It makes us toughen up a little bit so it's all good."
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