The RB team was excited about the Formula 1 Miami GP weekend, with the results obtained in the Sprint race and this Sunday’s GP, where Yuki Tsunoda finished in P7, once again scoring points, and Daniel Ricciardo was in P15 , after a great P4 in Saturday’s Sprint.
Laurent Mekies, team principal: “In its third year, the Miami GP has established itself as a major event and the popularity of our sport continues to grow at an astonishing rate in the USA. Here, alongside the thrilling action on the track, fans are treated to a wide range of shows, concerts and events. We enjoyed contributing to the scene with our unique livery, which was well received by fans. We came here with some updates and they lived up to our expectations, and our drivers played an important role in extracting performance from the car with a P4 for Daniel and P8 for Yuki at the end of yesterday’s Sprint race. It was a great result for the team. I want to thank everyone at Faenza and Bicester once again for their continued effort, striving for performance. It was particularly gratifying to see Daniel back in great form, demonstrating the skills and determination that we know have always been there. Unfortunately, he started on the back foot today, starting from P20. In the second section, he got stuck in traffic and was unable to move up the order and had to settle for P15. As for Yuki, his fourth Q3 appearance in six races this season underlines how consistent he is performing and today, he showed his maturity with intelligent yet aggressive and super-fast driving, from tenth on the grid to seventh at the checkered flag. Excellent work!” he concluded.
Tsunoda: “Very happy, what a great job from the team! It was an incredible week where we scored points in both races. We expected that we would perform well here, but the most important thing is that we achieved that. As a team, we stuck to our plan and didn’t make any mistakes today. As for me, overall, I’m happy with my driving, despite making a mistake at the start. I recovered and continued, and especially in the last stretch where I was alone, I was pushing and getting similar lap times to the cars in front. The team developed a great car and I really liked it. The amount of effort in the factory is incredible and in the end we managed to score well-deserved points. We’ve been able to progress quickly since the start of the season, so I’m looking forward to the future. In the next race in Imola, I hope we can continue with our pace and achieve a good result in front of our local public, especially the factory people. Everyone is doing a fantastic job and we will definitely keep pushing,” he added.
Ricciardo: “Going into the race you always have some optimism, but yesterday’s qualifying session hurt, and unfortunately, I think it was the format of today’s race. I was stuck in traffic during the race and simply wasn’t fast enough to get past the grid. I struggled a lot to use our pace compared to what we did yesterday in the Sprint in clear air. Compared to other cars, I think with our setup we were quite under straight line speed. I couldn’t do anything and was stuck behind them. We will definitely look into this in our debrief, but generally we know we have to qualify better, as I did on Friday, which was also a mirror of yesterday’s Sprint. Taking away the positive points, the team leaves Miami very happy. I’m also very happy for Lando (Norris), many congratulations to him, he’s a rival, but also a friend. I know how talented he is and I knew it was only a matter of time before he achieved his first F1 victory.”
F1MANIA.NET follows the Miami GP ‘in loco’ with journalists Victor D. Berto and Rodrigo França.
Download our official app to Android It is iPhone and receive notifications of the latest news.
