Daniel Ricciardo taking positives from testing

Daniel Ricciardo is taking positives from the pre-season testing, saying that if Renault arrive in Melbourne and are the sixth fastest team he will be disappointed. Renault looked good in testing, but so did other midfield teams such as Racing Point and McLaren, with the midfield set to be congested in Australia.

Ricciardo endured a fairly tough season at Renault last year following his move from Red Bull at the end of 2018, securing a best finish of fourth in Italy.

The Aussie led the timesheets at times during testing and said that he was pleased with the pace shown by his car. He has been joined at the French team by Esteban Ocon after Nico Hulkenberg was let go at the end of last season.

Ricciardo told media following testing in Barcelona: "There's the part where you're reserved because it's just testing and we had a C5. We know that we're not as quick as Mercedes now, so I don't know what they were doing, but I don't want to get that ahead of ourselves.

"I don't necessarily get excited about the P1, but in saying that, if I put the C5 on and we were P6, for sure I would be disappointed. It is nice, at least we put in a good lap. We were able to use a good tyre relatively well. So there's positives for sure.

"We've been doing this long enough to know that's not necessarily what we're going to qualify in Melbourne. But it's still positive for us to see that we extracted a quick time."