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F1 Australian GP: Ricciardo keen to start season

Daniel Ricciardo is feeling excited ahead of his home Australian Grand Prix and the start of the F1 2016 season.

Ricciardo has already ruled out fighting for victory in Melbourne and expects the pecking order to remain largely unchanged, but nevertheless he is keen to get back racing as Red Bull looks to recover from a disappointing 2015.

"Me personally, I'm ready to go - I was ready in January and I'm still ready now! Just keen for those lights to go out and to get racing!" he enthused. "I think everyone's excited to get going, but even if the race was elsewhere I think there's no-one more excited than me to go racing, period!

"But the fact that it's in Oz and I'm going to have more supporters than anyone else, hell yeah I'm excited!

"In fact, I'm going to have to control my adrenaline because there's a long build up over the weekend. Sunday's cool, it's probably the quietest day of the week for us in terms of other obligations so it's really time to just focus on the race. When I'm on the grid on Sunday, it'll just be full focus, full determination, knowing that I've got a battle on my hands the next hour and a half, a battle I'll look forward to!"

Asked what makes going to the Australian GP so special, he replied: "For me the favourite things about the Australian GP are first of all the fans. They're pretty awesome, every day we go to the track we get a pretty big greeting from everyone and they are super enthusiastic, it's cool! The track is fun [too], I love street circuits so for me Melbourne's got really good flow, really good corner combinations, lots of left/right, left/rights which is cool."

"And I'm not a massive fan of the European winter so getting back to Oz, not only to race but just to get back to some sunshine is great. To hear the Aussie accent, have some good Aussie food and live that summer lifestyle is great, so not really much to complain about!" he added.

Meanwhile, Ricciardo has reiterated just how much of a better pre-season Red Bull has had compared to twelve months ago.

"Testing's been a lot better for us this year. You still don't really know where you are until you get to Melbourne, but we're better prepared than we were this time last year so we can use that," he summed-up.

Zdroj: crash.net