Ricciardo: I'll probably need rain to compete

Daniel Ricciardo has admitted that he will need intervention from the weather in order to be competitive in Sunday's French Grand Prix, with the Mercedes' of Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas dominating all of Saturday's qualifying session in an ominous performance.

The Mercedes duo were followed in by Sebastian Vettel in third before the Red Bull duo of Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo arrived in P4 and P5, though neither truly threatened to get involved in proceedings.

Ricciardo admitted to journalists after the race that his car is set up in such a way that he will probably need rain to arrive to mix things up in order to stand a chance of competing.

The Aussie said: "With rain, yeah. With a dry race, put it this way, we have more downforce than my team-mate. We split it yesterday and went to go there [Verstappen’s setup] this morning but we didn’t get to try it so we went back to what we knew [his setup].

“So I think I have more downforce than everyone else, therefore passing probably won’t be that easy on the straights. I need a good start and then go from there.

Ricciardo added that he felt frustrated throughout much of the session because there was very little way he could extract anything more from the car, simply due to how his Red Bull had been set up prior to rain interrupting events during FP3.

He added: “P5 is better than P6, thats alright, but the session itself was frustrating because in a way, I was a passenger. Not a passenger per se, but limited with what I could improve because of the limitations in qualifying.”

“It is a little bit frustrating, I felt like the hands were tied. We basically had understeer quite early and we had used all the front wing quite early so there was nothing else we could really do to address the understeer and we did make a change this morning for the session but then it was wet so we had to come back with what we did yesterday.”