"It was just a struggle from the start" - Daniel Ricciardo candidly admits he was 'slow' at the 2022 F1 Spanish GP

The 2022 Spanish Grand Prix made for the fourth weekend this season where Daniel Ricciardo failed to score a point after finishing outside the top-10. The Aussie admitted that he simply lacked pace, despite the significant upgrades brought in by McLaren to Barcelona.

After the race, the Aussie said:

“It wasn’t a good race today. I’d love to find something positive, but it was just a struggle from the start. I was slow, and I simply had a lot less grip than everyone else around me. With the three stops, we had four chances on different sets of tyres, but we didn’t have the pace on any of them. I’m not really sure why, to be honest, so we’ll try to have a look and understand it. Hopefully, we can get on top of it as the upgrades we brought were good. We’ve got a short turnaround for Monaco and then we’ll go again and hope for a better one in a week.”

McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl reflected on the weekend, saying:

“On Daniel’s side unfortunately, after getting into Q3 yesterday, we were struggling a lot with the rear of the car whenever we tried to push more, and went backwards in the race finishing in P12. We have some homework to do over the next couple of days to understand why.”

With a nightmare weekend in Spain, Daniel Ricciardo currently remains eleventh in the driver standings.

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Daniel Ricciardo wished to find something wrong with "slow" McLaren at the Spanish GP

Daniel Ricciardo admitted that his car was so slow compared to the rest of the race last weekend that he almost hoped to find something wrong with it so that they could find an actual solution to the problem.

As reported by f1.com, the Australian said:

“I mean, everyone came into the weekend curious for how they are going to perform. It’s one of those races where it was so slow – it almost sounds bad to say but you hope that something was wrong, you hope that we find something that’s like ‘oh that’s why’, as it’s more concerning if we don’t. Like I said, I wasn’t like a tenth or two-tenths off, it felt like over a second at times. I don’t know that for a fact, but certainly I saw the cars pass me and pull away very quickly. Yeah… tough one.”

Meanwhile, his teammate Lando Norris, who was severely unwell during the race, managed to secure eighth place.