Perez warned more Mexico GP embarrassment could be coming after Ricciardo blow

29 October 2023 , 01:43

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Daniel Ricciardo was delighted with his Mexico GP qualifying result (Image: Getty Images)

Daniel Ricciardo thinks he can deliver "a big bag of points" in the Mexican Grand Prix and is adamant his qualifying result was no fluke.

In a Saturday session full of surprises, the Aussie's result was a contender to be the biggest of them all. Out of nowhere, Ricciardo put his AlphaTauri car on the second row with a lap quick enough for fourth place.

It meant he got the better of Sergio Perez, who could only manage to go fifth fastest despite having the support of the crowd and the quicker Red Bull car. And that did not go unnoticed by F1 fans on social media.

Speaking to reporters after the session, Ricciardo insisted the result was no fluke and could not hide his excitement over what might be possible in Sunday's race. "From lap one yesterday I felt good, and really all weekend I felt we had a car to figure well inside the top 10," he beamed.

"You never know in quali because, obviously, everyone turns it up, but I was confident in myself that I could definitely get some more tenths out of the car. In Q1 and Q2, Yuki [Tsunoda] was great, gave me a tow just to obviously make sure we got into Q3, but then in Q3, I didn't have a tow and we still showed really good pace.

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"So I think that's probably the coolest thing about today, that it wasn't, 'Oh, okay, they did it, but he gained a couple of tenths from a tow'. We had raw pace, and actually the last lap when I crossed the line I was pretty angry because I didn't improve.

"I was up in the first sector and then we slowly lost it through the lap, so I kind of threw that one away. But by the sounds of it, no one really improved at the end with a second set of new softs so maybe the track kind of fell away, so that made me feel a little bit better."

His best lap means a first start from the second row for more than two years for Ricciardo. And the most encouraging for him and his team, the Aussie feels, is not only the fact he was fourth quickest but that the gap to pole was much smaller than might have been expected.

He added: "Obviously P4 is amazing, but then you see pole and it's two-tenths. It's not like Max [Verstappen] or someone is seven or eight-tenths down the road. The gap is just as cool as the position. We're really there and who knows what it means for tomorrow, but I don't think today is a fluke. I really felt like we had strong pace.

"With the perfect lap, I went through it in my head last night and I thought maybe we could be a P6 or P7 if everything goes well. So I definitely had confidence that we weren't just a P10 car – but P4 is pretty cool."

Daniel Moxon