RB team principal Laurent Mekies believes Red Bull may have put unnecessary pressure on Daniel Ricciardo by publicly announcing the timing of driver evaluations for line-up consideration.
All eyes in the paddock at the Singapore Grand Prix were on Ricciardo as Red Bull revealed they would be evaluating their driver line-up after the race amid speculation that Liam Lawson would take the wheel from the US Grand Prix onwards.
Before the summer break, Red Bull similarly announced that they would use the time off to evaluate their drivers, an approach that Mekies believes may have hurt Ricciardo’s performance.
“There’s nothing wrong with evaluating a driver’s performance every few races, but we may have been a little too public about it,” Mekies said, according to RACER.
“We did that earlier in the season, we did that quite extensively before the summer break and I think we did that again now where we said we’d have a discussion after Singapore.”
“It’s part of the game but it’s certainly possible to go a little too far in terms of pressure, especially in this case with Daniel.”
“He’s been in these situations a number of times this season – some weekends were uneventful, some weekends were quite difficult and this was definitely the latter.”
“Obviously, the drivers are top athletes and they know how to handle it, but sometimes it can create unnecessary pressure.”
“I’d like to think that overall it’s not a distraction, but in all cases, it takes a little bit of energy away.”
Ricciardo has had a rather unspectacular season, contrary to his own and Red Bull’s higher-ups’ expectations, but not so badly that he should be sacked with six races remaining – or at least not in the same situation as Williams’ replacement Logan Sargent, who never performed nearly as well as the team expected.
Ricciardo has often impressed this year, finishing fourth in the Miami sprint, taking eighth in the Canadian Grand Prix and finishing fastest in the midfield in qualifying in Hungary.
On the other hand, he has also had some lackluster weekends at times, which have led to a sense of inconsistency that has been offset by a lack of competitiveness in RB’s midfield, some puzzling strategic decisions on the pitwall and the inconsistent effectiveness of upgrades – a pattern shared by team-mate Yuki Tsunoda himself.
Speaking about Ricciardo in Singapore, Mekies said: “It was a really close fight in every respect and Daniel was really fast all weekend, but he didn’t have the ideal session on the soft tyre (in qualifying).”
“Certainly we cannot ignore the fact that he was in a particularly difficult context this weekend, when every tenth of a second makes all the difference.”
On the first day, Ricciardo managed to stay in the top seven, but in qualifying, where slight differences in tire temperature had a major impact on the order, he was narrowly eliminated in Q1. It was difficult to make a comeback from the back on the Marina Bay street circuit, where overtaking is difficult, and Ricciardo returned to his home country of Australia without scoring any points.
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