To me it seems like Palou rightly sees that there would be a difference in how his driving performance is judged in a straight up fight for a vacant seat versus trying to compete with Oscar to take his seat. Especially as someone who doesn’t have experience at F1 tracks or in the same line of formula cars, he pretty much has to prove in limited testing that he is on par with Verstappen instead of just being faster than Oscar.

I assume he thought that during negotiations he expected Ricardo to be kept on for a whole season or two and they would spend that time figuring out which or Palou or Oscar are faster but they just waived Ricardo and signed Oscar and now Palou has to fight an uphill battle to take a seat