Toro Rosso driver Daniel Ricciardo does not feel any undue amount of pressure over his race seat for the 2012 Formula One season, despite the Red Bull junior squad's historical lack of patience with their drivers if they begin to struggle.
Ricciardo will get his chance in a relatively competitive F1 seat for 2012 with the Scuderia Toro Rosso team, after making his debut last season with backmarkers HRT.
He will race alongside Jean-Eric Vergne in 2012, after Red Bull chose to drop both of their 2011 junior team drivers for the new season.
The dropping of both Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari was the latest in a long history of Red Bull being happy to drop their young drivers for not coming up to scratch.
But Ricciardo has said that while he does feel pressure for 2012, it is nothing that he hasn't already experienced in his career.
"I feel pressure to deliver yes, but it's not only pressure from Red Bull, it's pressure from myself," he told the Autosport website this week.
"And not only this year, but since I joined with Red Bull four or five years ago."
He went on: "Even before that I put pressure on myself to try and get spotted by Red Bull. So I guess for my whole career.
"Basically every driver, to get to this level, has put pressure on themselves."
And he added that he was expecting his more streamlined workload in 2012 to help him to deal with the latest stage of his career.
In 2011, Ricciardo raced for HRT as well as competing in the Renault World Series.
#"Last year was pretty intense when I was juggling [a Friday role with] Toro Rosso, World Series and then HRT. And there was a lot of travelling involved," he rambled.
"This year I will definitely be better prepared and devote a bit more time to the job, to training and to focus with less interruptions."
Ricciardo will get back behind the wheel of the STR7 on Tuesday at the latest pre-season test in Barcelona.
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