• Toro Rosso News

Ricciardo keen to stake Red Bull claim

Toro Rosso's Daniel Ricciardo believes he is ready to step up to Red Bull but that he needs to prove himself worthy of the seat after some recent poor results.

Speaking to ESPN at the FOTA Fans Forum before Mark Webber's decision to join Porsche was announced, Ricciardo said he needs to bounce back from recent poor results to perform better against team-mate Jean-Eric Vergne if he wants to impress Red Bull.

After the news broke, when he was asked if he was ready for a move to Red Bull, Ricciardo replied: "Yeah.

"Ideally in the perfect world I'd love one of us juniors to go through and do what Seb [Vettel] did; I think that's the real philosophy of the program. I think they'd love to see one of us really start to shine and get a string of awesome races and something that's really going to turn heads. That will make the decision easy for them and that's probably what they ideally want to see.

"If they end up picking someone like Kimi [Raikkonen] then he's a world champion and they're a world championship winning team so you can't argue with something that they end up doing."

Team-mate Vergne said he wouldn't add any extra importance to the upcoming races but admitted it "would be a dream" to earn a move to Red Bull.

"I would love to race for Red Bull; they're the people who gave me the opportunity to get in to Formula One and they're obviously the people who have the best car and they're world champions so that would be a dream and I think everybody would love to get this seat."

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