Ricciardo admits Red Bull "needs more speed" on supersofts

Ricciardo was fifth and Verstappen seventh on the opening day, as neither Red Bull found the fresh-tyre burst that rivals Mercedes and Ferrari made use of around the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez.

“We did a lot of laps, which was positive, but we still need to find some more speed,” said Ricciardo. “It wasn’t the perfect day, but we learned a lot.

“We need to find a few things with the setup and I can find a little bit here and there – hopefully that’s enough. It’s tricky, because it’s so slippery here. Hopefully the grip improves, because you have a bit of understeer and oversteer when the grip is so low. I expected it to be better.

“The supersoft is the fastest tyre, but I don’t think we’ll be doing many laps on it on Sunday. I think we improved it from this morning, but there is still some progress to make.”

Verstappen rues FP1 fire

In this morning’s first practice, Verstappen was forced to miss the final half of the session due to a rear-brake fire that damaged his car’s electrical wiring loom.

“It was not ideal to miss so much of the first practice,” said Verstappen. “It was just a bit unfortunate I needed to do two install laps, to go out again, and they told me to just keep pushing – and you can’t push on your in-lap. The combination went on to be a bit of a fire.

“In second practice I was doing a lot of set-up changes to feel more comfortable. I think in the long run we finally got to grips with it. I made a change, it worked pretty well and we were strong.

“I think our short-run pace is not very representative, we need to look into that. I was still not happy with the balance of the car, because I missed the first practice, but when you look to our long runs – on the medium it felt very good.

“It’s not an ideal track for us, we just have to deal with it. I think our race pace is very strong.”

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