Barcelona, home to the tenth round of the Formula 1 World Championship is also the venue for sailing’s blue riband racing event, the America’s Cup. Before getting down to the serious business of navigating his VCARB01 car round the Barcelona-Catalunya circuit, Daniel Ricciardo tried his hand helming an AC40 yacht, sailing’s equivalent of a Formula 1 car. Our Aussie went head-to-head against another Red Bull athlete, the MotoGP legend that is eight time world champion, Marc Marquez.

Like most of the teams, we came here with a big upgrade package, all part of our aggressive season-long car development programme but, we found ourselves in uncharted waters on Friday, as it was difficult get a read on the new components and our VCARB01 was simply not on the pace. On top of that, the Drag Reduction System on the new rear wing, which temporarily boosts top speed to help with setting a qualifying lap time and overtaking, was malfunctioning.

The general feeling was that the upgrades, including an all-important new floor were producing the expected numbers, but they weren’t translating into lap time and the car lacked rear end grip. Data analysis and number crunching at the track and back in Faenza went on long into the night to try and turn things around. We didn’t. Or at least, not by much and both cars went out of qualifying in the first part, with Yuki booking the 17^th grid slot for the Spanish GP and Daniel just one place behind him.

On the Barcelona-Catalunya track, where overtaking is tricky, it would have taken something unusual – rain, a Safety Car – for the Visa Cash App RB pair to bring home any points, but it wasn’t to be and although for a while it looked as though Daniel might latch on to the back of the top ten, after muscling his way up to 15^th, he lost time in traffic and had to settle for that, while Yuki, despite efforts to tweak his settings at the pit stop, fought his car to the flag in 19^th place.