Rather than making his comeback in the kind of race-winning RB19 machinery that he shone with during this week’s Silverstone tyre test, he will be battling a car that has left AlphaTauri currently at the bottom of the constructors’ standings.
Worse than that, the Australian will also find himself having to cope with a critical weakness in the AT04 that is in the very area that left him struggling so much during his two years at McLaren.
Ricciardo is well known for responding well to a car that is strong under braking and corner entry. Give him something that performs with those characteristics and his brilliance comes to the fore, as has been witnessed many times with his trademark late-braking overtaking manoeuvres.
But, as was exposed during his McLaren spell, if the car he is driving does not give him confidence on corner entry, things can quickly spiral out of control. As he told F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast last year about the corner entry issue: “It all starts there.
“If you struggle with a corner on the exit, normally it’s a product of what’s happened through the corner that’s put you in a position of, let’s say, difficulty on the exit. Most difficulties start on the entry – maybe not all, but most.”
Therefore, it is probably not ideal for Ricciardo to know that one of the main issues that Yuki Tsunoda and the ousted Nyck de Vries have struggled with this year is a limitation in the late entry phase to corners, which triggers rear instability. It’s not a great thing for driver confidence.
Speaking recently before the Ricciardo decision was made, AlphaTauri’s head of trackside engineering Jonathan Eddolls was open about this critical issue the team was chasing a solution for.
“The late entry, let's say rear instability, which was the bigger weakness, that's the area we've been working on,” he said. “We have improved it, but it's still a weakness, I would say.”
Source: Autosport