McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl says Daniel Ricciardo’s Monaco struggles were driver-related, backed up by their data.
Ricciardo has struggled to adapt to his MCL35M since joining McLaren for the 2021 campaign, but the Monaco Grand Prix was a serious backwards step for the Australian as he emphatically lagged behind his team-mate Lando Norris throughout the weekend.
After suffering Q2 elimination, Ricciardo suggested his lack of pace must have been down to the car.
Those comments did not irk Seidl though, quite the opposite, for he loves to see emotion like that from a driver.
“First of all, one reason why I love the sport, and why you guys love this sport, is because it’s a human sport, and we like the emotions from team members or drivers after good or bad sessions or races,” he told The Race.
“That’s why I think you have to put in context the quotes from Daniel after qualifying.”
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McLaren did, of course, take a deep look into the issue to find answers, and now have a “clear idea” of what is going wrong for Ricciardo.
And it seems the problems are very much at Ricciardo’s end, although McLaren will do what they can to bring the car to his liking.
“We have, when we look into the data, a clear idea of why Daniel couldn’t produce the lap time in Q2 to progress to Q3,” Seidl confirmed.
“Our car needs a certain way of driving it in order to extract the performance Lando can extract from it.
“This is not natural for Daniel. And that’s obviously an issue and takes time until you can recalibrate yourself in order to make it natural for yourself.
“But at the same time it’s also the task for us to see what we can do on the car, change it, in order to make it more natural for him so he can extract the performance again [that] we are all used to from him, with a clear objective to not lose overall car performance by that.
“That’s the process we are in at the moment. I’m impressed with how both the team and Daniel are handling this challenging situation. We simply need more time and then in some races we will not talk about this issue anymore.”
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