Scuderia AlphaTauri believes that AT04’s weakness in corner entry was covered up in the previous F1 Hungarian GP, and refrains from giving a clear answer about how Daniel Ricciardo will show the team’s F1 machine. Ricciardo joined his former team on loan from Red Bull to replace the sacked Nick de Vries.
One area where De Vries struggled with the AT04 was weak corner entry, a problem that also plagued Ricciardo in his McLaren days. Ricciardo beat teammate Yuki Tsunoda in qualifying and finished 13th despite being rear-ended by Guanyu Zhou at the start. He said he settled into the car quickly after an eight-month break. But according to AlphaTauri’s head of trackside engineering Jonathan Eddles, the twisty Hungaroring characteristics combined with the high temperatures masked some of the AT04’s unwieldy characteristics, and the jury is still out on how Ricciardo will fare with the new car. Asked if the AlphaTauri still had weaknesses in corner entry, Eddles said before the race: “It’s not really the biggest limitation so far this weekend because the grip and downforce of the tyres have masked it. It’s not so much of an issue here.” “Interestingly, we can use maximum downforce and very soft tires here. The nature of the circuit allows us to run very low pressures on the tyres, one of the lowest pressures of the season.” However, according to Edols, despite the team’s recent upgrades, which include reworked floors and new front and rear wings, fixing the weak corner entry is still a work in progress. “This update addresses that,” Eddles said. “I can’t say we’ve fixed it, but even if[the drivers]haven’t commented, I think we understand why, so that’s certainly the way we want to go.” Ricciardo, 34, has not reported any significant weaknesses or shortcomings in how his car behaves, but added Eddles, who only confirmed that the team needed to add more aerodynamic load to the car to gain a foothold in the midfield. “On the positive side, the feedback we’ve gotten from Daniel so far confirms our general direction and we need more downforce,” Eddles said. “He said that, as we all know, we are a little bit short of downforce compared to the top teams. But so far he hasn’t mentioned any specific big weaknesses. I understand that the car is not a big problem and just needs a little more load to be competitive.” Not only that, he explained that running in clean air gave him more information about the car’s capabilities. “Oh, it was really important,” said Ricciardo. “Maybe it would have been a more disappointing race and there are still a lot of questions to answer,” he said. “In clean air we had the pace and of course we made some mistakes and we can learn from that. I think we learned a lot from the race in terms of knowing what the car likes and what it doesn’t like.”
2023-07-25 11:52:56
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