Why Ricciardo has high hopes despite 's***house' penalty

Australian F1 driver Daniel Ricciardo may have been slapped with a three-place grid penalty for Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix, but he’s confident his car can go the distance to snatch the best possible result.

Ricciardo was fuming over the penalty for a minor speeding incident during red-flag conditions in Friday's second practice session, labelling the sanction 's***house' in a TV interview on Saturday.

His Red Bull Racing team raced the fewest laps of all teams last year, care of nine retirements across both drivers – with seven related to its Renault power unit, issues since sorted by the French manufacturer.

“The first box to be ticked was reliability, and Renault has addressed that pretty strongly so far,” Ricciardo said.

“Testing was really good for us, as far as the mileage was concerned. It was a case of ‘let’s get reliability sorted, and then chip away at the performance’.

“There’s obviously a few gains already, but we haven’t gone those big steps yet with performance.

“We’ve just been trying to focus on reliability because at the end of the day if we are going to fight for a title [this year], we need to be finishing pretty much every race – especially when Mercedes are so strong, reliably. So reliability is on point now. Just we’ll try and eke a bit of performance out over the next few races.”

The 28-year-old is also stronger, mentally – with the team giving him less media commitments at his home race this year, to better prepare for the racing.

“We’ve definitely been consciously taking things back,” Ricciardo said.

“Last year was hectic. I was in Sydney on the Monday doing media and then flew here and it was just too much in terms of ‘why are we here?’

“Are we here to please the media or are we here to race F1 cars so that was just where it got. Inevitably there’s always going to be a lot of media here and a lot of attention, it’s the first race and I’m the Aussie so I get that. So it’s always going to be a busy weekend than every other one.

“But we’ve been a lot more sensible this year so I feel alright. And the more I do it obviously, each year that ticks by, the more I’m used to it so I can kind of manage the attention better. But I’m just hungry to race now.”

Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix will be Ricciardo’s 130th F1 start, with his best result to date fourth place in the 2016 race.