Daniel Ricciardo set the third best laptime in FP1 and FP2 in Montreal, whereas his teammate Max Verstappen imperiously topped both sessions.

Despite Renault provided all clients with their updated power unit, the Australian driver escaped the grid penalty that he was expected to take in Canada. Nonetheless, Ricciardo suffered a number of electric issues over the day, which slightly compromised his Friday programme.

"We were covered enough to get some laps. We did a few laps even this morning but we already had some of the issues even at the start, so we tried to fix them over lunch and initially the team couldn’t fix them. We were waiting, waiting and waiting, and eventually we went out."

Ricciardo will benefit from Max Verstappen's work today to make up with his lack of running: "In the end I’m not excited about the laptimes, we didn’t even get many laps in and we didn’t get enough time to make some changes either. But Max was very strong all day, at least we have a little bit of a platform to work with."

The Red Bull driver is in for some real talk, as he believes Mercedes will be hard to catch tomorrow and on Sunday. The German outfit blew the opposition away on the race pace simulation, hence Ricciardo thinks the fight will be against Ferrari.

"I think we did OK overall. I have to say that Mercedes’ pace is really fast and on the SS tyre they still did pretty good laps. They will be hard to beat, we can sort of improve the car a lot. I guess the fight will be with Ferrari and I’m sure Mercedes will be very fast tomorrow and on Sunday."