One of the more fascinating storylines to follow over the final act of the 2024 Formula 1 season is the battle for sixth place.
Heading into Sunday’s Dutch Grand Prix, you might give Haas a slight advantage over Visa Cash App RB F1 Team in that fight.
While Haas saw both Kevin Magnussen and Nico Hülkenberg advance into Q2, VCARB saw Daniel Ricciardo eliminated in Q1, with only Yuki Tsunoda moving into the second portion of qualifying. While Tsunoda will start up in P12, with both Haas drivers behind him, Ricciardo will be behind them all, starting 16th.
It was not where VCARB expected to be.
“It was definitely tricky out there in a windy day and with generally tough conditions,” said Ricciardo in the team’s post-qualifying report. “It was really hard to put a clean lap together in qualifying, and I just felt that I was probably struggling a little bit more than maybe some others.
“We found things in the setup last night that were encouraging coming into today, but unfortunately, we were not quick enough and just very much on a knife edge,” added Ricciardo. “I was sliding with the rear out of some turns so I had to take a bit of margin, but in doing that we were slow because I couldn’t push as much as I would have liked to, and that is where I felt I couldn’t get the lap out of it. Being out in Q1 doesn’t help ahead of tomorrow as it’s a narrow circuit and not one of those notorious for easily overtaking, but let’s see what happens.”
While Tsunoda advanced into Q2, he indicated that he was “disappointed” by the performance.
“I’m definitely disappointed, it feels like we stepped down quite a lot from FP2. I was happy with my lap, but for whatever reason we lacked quite a lot of pace compared to what we had,” described Tsunoda. “I thought we’d go through quite easily, but even in Q1 we struggled quite a lot, and it was pretty tight to get P10, so we’ll have to revise what happened. It’s not too bad of a place to start to score points, the last two days has been very inconsistent weather and we saw from last year in the race anything can happen, so I’ll try my best.”
At the moment, VCARB enjoys a seven-point lead over Haas in that fight for sixth, with the tally on the year 34-27. But with just ten race weekends left in the season, this fight is far from over, and every position on the track counts.
We’ll see which of these two teams can make the most of things on Sunday at Zandvoort.