After a very strong showing at the Bahrain Grand Prix, McLaren looked like the favorites going into the second race weekend of this season. But the hype seems to have died down drastically since both the McLarens hit the track on Friday afternoon. Daniel Ricciardo, in particular, looked nowhere near the comfort zone while in the car.

While the last year’s podium-getter ended FP1 in P10, FP2 was much worse, as he could only manage P18. One might assume that Ricciardo, being a newcomer, is still trying to get a grip on the McLaren.

But what’s shocking is that even Lando Norris replicated a similar outing on Friday with P13 in FP1 and P8 in FP2. Hence, following the struggle-induced practice sessions, Ricciardo opined that there’s a lot of work to be done in the garage overnight to make it to Q3 “comfortably” on Saturday.

What did Daniel Ricciardo say?

As reported by PlanetF1, Ricciardo admitted that McLaren were far from expectations in terms of pace throughout Friday.

“We’ll work tonight. We’ve got our engineering debrief in a few minutes. So, yeah I think we’ll spend a fair bit of time trying to figure out what we were missing today,” Ricciardo said.

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“I think, to comfortably put ourselves in Q3 tomorrow, we do need to make some changes. We’re not really there yet.

“Saying that, it’s a cool track. I still had fun. But obviously, I want to find some competitiveness.”

To add to McLaren’s woes, their threats, AlphaTauri and Ferrari, have looked in red hot form. Pierre Gasly, in particular, has been hitting the targets with ease and has stuck right behind the Mercedes duo throughout the afternoon, ending both the sessions in P4 and P3, respectively.

Hence, it looks almost impossible for McLaren to close down the gap to the two rival teams.

Saturday is very important: Ricciardo

The McLaren driver is aware that Imola offers little to no room for overtakes. Hence, the qualifying session will be possessing a much bigger priority than usual.

“It is really tricky to overtake here. And we can’t afford to put ourselves too far in the pack after tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

“So yeah, it’s all well and good maybe being a bit quicker on high fuel. But we certainly tonight – at least from my side, it’s definitely all the focus on one-lap performance.”

Imola returned to the Formula 1 grid last year, and Ricciardo drove a brilliant race to gift himself a podium alongside the two Mercedes drivers.

So, with such a successful history, can Ricciardo manage to squeeze another podium out of the weekend?

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