Ricciardo remains wary of Renault engine ‘vulnerabilities’

Daniel Ricciardo says he is satisfied Renault is making progress with its engine in terms of reliability even if he doesn’t expect to end the season without facing more technical issues.

In a season that has seen Red Bull struggle to take a consistent fight to Ferrari and Mercedes in terms of raw pace it has also been let down by a series of technical issues on the ‘TAG-Heuer’ engine side, hampering both Ricciardo and team-mate Max Verstappen.

With Ricciardo already forced to take a grid penalty at the British Grand Prix, the Australian is in no doubt he will suffer another pre-race drop soon.

“We know that at some point we will have to take that extra penalty again because we are already up to the last one. I was with Renault recently and every reliability failure we’ve had there has been an explanation for it.

“So there has been a cure for all of those, but there is still some vulnerabilities which we are well aware of. They think they have got on top of most of them, but it doesn’t mean we are not going to have another one.”

“They are different things, and then they will figure it out, solve it, and then something else, so they feel that they have covered most bases now, but things are pretty interesting so you never know.

Though Ricciardo is praiseworthy of the progress made in terms of performance during a race, he says Red Bull is still lacking in qualifying, describing Mercedes’ fabled ‘qualifying mode’ as ‘ridiculous’.

“In performance qually mode we don’t have what Mercedes have, their qually mode is ridiculous. But in racing we are running in our race trim power like we saw in Austria until Lewis was able to turn it up, we are not too shabby, we can kind of race with them if they are not using a qually mode. So performance on a Sunday is getting there.”