"There's quite a lot to digest today" - McLaren 's Daniel Ricciardo hopes to find 'optimal set-up' for qualifying after free practice at 2022 F1 Spanish GP

Daniel Ricciardo reflected on Friday's free practice sessions, where McLaren secured a decent result in FP1 but a less than ideal finish in FP2.

As reported by formula1.com, Ricciardo hoped to make it into Q3 by finding the "optimal set-up" for qualifying, saying:

“There’s quite a lot to digest today. We tried quite a few different settings for both sessions. We clearly aren’t where we want to be on the timesheets but there’s a lot to dive into tonight. I think we’ll find some things and, let’s say, find the optimal set-up for tomorrow and hopefully that puts us inside the top 10. Right now, there’s still a lot to take in so I’m not too sure how much to look into the times today. It was interesting to see the other cars and teams and what they’re doing. But we’ll focus on ourselves as for sure everyone today was exploring a few new things on their cars.”

McLaren currently stands fourth in the constructors' standings and hopes to take the challenge to Mercedes up front.

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McLaren gathered "a lot of information" from Daniel Ricciardo's free practice sessions

Despite a rocky Friday for the team at Barcelona following several issues with Lando Norris' car, McLaren managed to extract significant data from Daniel Ricciardo's run yesterday.

Reflecting on the two sessions from Friday, the Executive Racing Director at McLaren, Andrea Stella, said:

“It’s been a very busy Friday with a lot of test items to go through here in Spain. We introduced our new aerodynamic package and needed to assess that, but also had work to do understanding the tyres in these hot conditions, which are very different to those we experienced here during winter testing. Daniel’s sessions were quite clean and we have gathered a lot of information from those. We had a few more issues on Lando’s car. We needed to stop his programme early, after we picked up some damage running over a kerb - but we can repair that overnight. There’s a lot of analysis to do this evening - but hopefully we’re in good shape for qualifying and the race.”

The team, which has brought in a whopping 10 different upgrades at the Spanish Grand Prix, will be hoping to optimize on qualifying to secure good results this weekend, given that the Miami Grand Prix was simply a nightmare for it.