SOCHI, Russia -- Daniel Ricciardo says Red Bull's 1.8s gap to pole position was expected around its "bogey" track in Sochi.
Ricciardo took best-of-the rest honours behind Ferrari and Mercedes in Sochi, albeit a big margin off former teammate Sebastian Vettel's 1:33.194 benchmark. Red Bull has seen the gap to the front come down at each of the last three races, but Russia's qualifying gap was more than double the deficit the team had in Bahrain.
Despite falling further behind the leaders in Russia, Ricciardo thinks Red Bull can be happy with the fact he beat Williams' Felipe Massa into fifth position.
Speaking about the gap, Ricciardo said: "It looks big but last year it was about the same, 1.7, 1.8, so history shows it is a bit of a bogey one for us. I don't expect a 1.8 gap in Barcelona. If it is, then...
"[Qualifying was] everything I expected, so I expected fifth, all going well fifth was the target and I got that. We expected the gap to be bigger here than it was in Bahrain. The nature of the circuit has never been a strength for us, so no surprises today."
Red Bull continued to struggle to switch on the ultra-soft tyre, the softest compound in Pirelli's range of tyres this weekend. Ricciardo admits the team has taken a step backwards in terms of understanding its ultra-soft pace compared 2016.
"It was a bit like that last year, even with the ultra-soft sometimes we didn't really find any lap time, but then other times it kind of worked like there were a few qualifying with Monaco, Singapore, where if you can get it to work it happens. But it just seems quite fragile, delicate, and we are still learning. We kind of understood it towards the end of last year.
"Now this year with the new tyres, compounds, it seems we are back at the beginning. So it still seems to be an understanding process now. Like we've even seen across cars like what looks like subtle differences on the data can make a big difference with the tyre temperatures or things like that. So they do seem more sensitive this year and I am going to use my engineering expertise and say because the tyre is wider there is more of it on the track therefore more variability!"