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Ricciardo was drafted in for the Hungarian Grand Prix by AlphaTauri, as the team was then known, after sitting out the opening half of the 2023.
His performances were sufficient to be offered a new deal for 2024, alongside Yuki Tsunoda, but he’s made no secret of his desire to return to Red Bull Racing for 2025.
While that’s the stretch goal, the focus short term is on starting the year well.
“You can be experienced and whatever. Of course, it helps. But at this level, now, you can’t – I don’t know if it’s the right word – but you can’t cheat it,” Ricciardo admitted.
“You can’t just jump in halfway through the season and think that you’re going to be 100 percent on everything, technically, driving strategy, all these things.”
Ricciardo spent a day and a half in the RB during pre-season testing, as well as a filming day in Misano.
That’s afforded him the chance to work with engineers and engrain himself in the team in a way he wasn’t capable of doing a year ago.
“Just spending three days with the team doing all that, feeling the car and now having a few days to also discuss it post test, have that luxury of time without the stress of ‘we’ve got to bounce back to another race, another race., I think it’s that extra few percent that I think can make a difference.”
Testing was positive for RB.
The car looked balanced on track and is widely expected to have made a step forward on last season, leacing it somewhere firmly in the midfield pack.
“To be honest, there’s still more things with set-up that there’s still to try,’ Ricciardo admitted.
“I think we tried a lot, but there’s always more. Maybe we got 75 percent of the test items done. But there’s still a few more, ultimately.
“So I think it was very productive.
“And, obviously, between us as drivers, maybe I’m pushing like ‘I really want to try this’. We only have half a day, then obviously, Yuki maybe has different priorities,” he added.
“So yeah, there’s always a few more things. But actually, because now looking at tomorrow [Thursday], we know the track, we spend a lot of time here, we don’t need to get up to speed on the track.
“I think tomorrow we can use as another productive test day. So I think we can probably get most of those 25 percent of changes tomorrow.”
Opening practice for the Bahrain Grand Prix begins at 14:30 local time (22:30 AEDT).
