Young Australian Formula One driver Daniel Ricciardo is continuing to punch above his weight, sizzling in his Torro Rosso during testing in Italy.
The West Australian set the fourth quickest time at the Mugello circuit, where Lotus driver Romain Grosjean again headed the time sheets on the third and final day.
Ricciardo completed 117 laps as he tested new aero parts, but said he was uncertain whether they made a big difference.
“With new parts you always hope they will deliver a big improvement, but the reality is that we must now look at the data to see where we really are,” Ricciardo said on the motorsport.com website.
“Certainly, from the cockpit I was happy with the feeling I had from the car and I really enjoyed driving this beautiful circuit again.”
Second quickest was Red Bull’s dual world champion Sebastian Vettel while Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso was third, despite crashing his car.
Grosjean lapped the circuit in 1m21.035s with Vettel clocking 1m21.267s in his Red Bull RB8. Ricciardo stopped the clock at 1m22.143s.
Vettel, who ran 106 laps, described the test session as “a useful couple of days.’
“As usual we now have a lot of data to get through and that will take some time. We tried a few things and the results look encouraging,” he said.
“It’s always difficult to tell whether we improved and by how much, but we got some good laps and some good information.”
Alonso, who was testing a completely revised rear aero package which included the Sauber/Red Bull style exhaust layout, ran wide at turn 12 in the morning session and hit the tyre barrier damaging the new front wing.
It took the Ferrari engineers two hours to assess and repair the damage before Alonso was able to continue testing.
Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg, winner of the last round in China, completed 129 laps and was eighth fastest.
Russian Caterham driver Vitaly Petrov was not happy with the Mugello circuit.
“I’m not sure the track is right for today’s Formula One cars, you get very close to the walls and it’s maybe a bit small for the cars now.” Petrov said.
His comments follow remarks from Mugello circuit director Paolo Poli who said he was interested in hosting a Grand Prix.
