Renault’s next car upgrade must bring a bigger performance step to keep the team on target to challenge for podiums next year, says Daniel Ricciardo.

He admitted the results have been mixed in his first half-season with the team.

“If I look at Canada, the qualifying, I’d actually say that exceeded some expectation in the first few races,” said Ricciardo. “But then obviously some other races like Austria that was lower than our expectations. So we’ve bounced around in between everything really.

“But now at this halfway point I think we can say alright, we need to do better. If we want to be on target for podiums in 2020 we need to start making bigger steps in the second half of the year.

“Up until now I’m somewhere in the middle with expectations. But I would now expect the second half of the season to have some more regular top six finishes or something.

The team’s last major upgrade came at the French Grand Prix and Ricciardo says the next “proper update” won’t come “until well after the summer break.”

“But I would expect some developments. We brought some updates in France, they weren’t massive, so I think the next batch we bring I would expect to feel a bit more.

“I’m not down or anything because again I would hope that we would be doing better. But I knew that, yes we want to be there, but I knew it was going to take some time. If we stay where we are now till the end of the season then then that’s lower than what we expect.”

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2019 F1 season