Ricciardo declares RB 'experiments' over after botched upgrade

Daniel Ricciardo has declared RB's 'upgrade experiments' to be over as the team recovers from its botched Spanish Grand Prix package.

RB introduced a sizeable raft of updates for Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda in Barcelona, but the car failed to deliver the expected gains in performance, with both cars knocked out in Q1 and suffering a point-less race.

Ricciardo and Tsunoda did pick up a points finish apiece in Austria and Britain as the team worked to understand where the upgrade had failed, with Ricciardo sanguine over the problems, believing 'downgrades' are to be expected.

"It's unlikely not to have some downgrades through the season, they're not unfortunately all upgrades," Ricciardo told media including RacingNews365. 

"I'd say for now, the experimenting is done as we brought quite a bit to Barcelona and some things were good, some were not.

"Honestly [the car] is probably now like half, straight down the middle between new and old. 

"Until that point, I felt everything we were putting on the car worked and was giving us performance. 

"A little bit of understanding has to take place, but at least we are now confident that we have the best parts on the car."

'Above my paygrade'

"That is above my paygrade, but I guess all the updates go back to the aero department," Ricciardo added when asked if the problems were around a lack of correlation.

"So it is not saying that "Oh, it didn't work', it is also understanding why it didn't work so we know what we bring moving forward is going to benefit us. 

"Obviously, between on-track, the wind tunnel and all these things have to correlate perfectly. 

"That's where we didn't quite get on track what we thought we would compared to what they saw in the data."