RB team principal Laurent Mekies says Daniel Ricciardo has already proven his competitiveness this season despite his scoreless start to the campaign.
Ricciardo has been comprehensively beaten by teammate Yuki Tsunoda in the opening four rounds, outqualified at every race and beaten in two of the three grands prix at which both have made the finish.
The contrast was starkest at the Australian Grand Prix, where Ricciardo bombed out of qualifying in Q1 after having his fastest lap time deleted while Tsunoda powered into Q3.
The Japanese ace scored points for seventh place as Ricciardo toiled to 12th.
Tsunoda scored again at his home Japanese Grand Prix last weekend to bring his points tally to seven, while Ricciardo ended his race in the barriers at turn 3 after a clumsy first-lap crash with Williams driver Alex Albon.
It paints a devastating picture for the Australian, who hopes to prove himself worthy of replacing Sergio Pérez at Red Bull Racing with a strong year with sister team RB.
But team principal Mekies doesn’t see it that way, insisting that Ricciardo’s pace has been clear despite the poor race-day returns.
“Things are improving with Daniel a lot, already from Australia,” he told Speed City Broadcasting.
“Even though he did a race [in Melbourne] from the back — a very frustrating race from the back — we’ve seen on his pace that the pace was there, so it gave us great confidence.”
Mekies also noted that Ricciardo had matched Tsunoda in qualifying in Japan despite effectively losing all of Friday practice to a combination of weather and the team’s decision to use one of its mandatory rookie practice sessions.
“[In qualifying] he was obviously right there as well for the top 10 together with Yuki, so it is a positive,” he said.
“Of course no driver wants to lose time in the car, and we know that every second counts and matters … but I’m sure he will be 100 per cent in China.
“These sorts of things happen. He has been around long enough to know that what matters is the speed, and he has the speed.”
Discounting Ricciardo’s deleted lap time from qualifying in Australia, the Aussie is faring relatively well in comparison to Tsunoda relative to other teammates, with an average deficit of 0.194 seconds.
That gap makes him the fifth closest teammate in the field behind Carlos Sainz, Lewis Hamilton, Oscar Piastri and Kevin Magnussen.
Pierre Gasly, Sergio Pérez, Logan Sargeant, Zhou Guanyu and Lance Stroll all carry worse deficits to their respective teammates.
On average he’s been less than 0.1 seconds slower than Tsunoda on race pace, making the Japanese-Australian combination the most closely matched teammates along with the Sauber and McLaren pairings.
Nonetheless, Ricciardo’s slow start to the year relative to Tsunoda has led to some writing off the Australian’s chances of remaining in Formula 1 beyond the end of the year, while some of his more extreme critics have written off his chances of seeing out the season.
Liam Lawson was widely considered unfortunate to have wound up without a seat on the 2024 grid following his impressive stand-in performances for Ricciardo late last year, and the Kiwi has reportedly been promised an RB seat in 2025.
Lawson has been omnipresent in the RB garage as Ricciardo has grappled with the task of reviving his career, but Mekies doesn’t believe the 22-year-old’s presence is adding any additional pressure to his fellow antipodean.
“There is always pressure at this level for an F1 driver,” he said. “The whole field is the same up and down the grid — there will be huge pressure.
“It doesn’t matter so much if the reserve driver is here or not. We have a very good reserve driver with Liam — he has shown last year how impressively he could step in — but I really don’t think it’s adding any pressure on the guys.”
