Daniel Ricciardo says he was angered by the strategy RB put him on in the Hungarian Grand Prix and then a lack of apology that followed the checkered flag.
RB started last Sunday’s race with both cars in the top 10, Ricciardo ninth ahead of teammate Yuki Tsunoda. Both drivers started on medium tires and were jumped by Alex Albon and Kevin Magnussen off the line, but Ricciardo was called into the pits on lap 7 — one lap after Albon and Magnussen — to fit hard tires and emerged behind both once again, limiting him to 12th at the finish.
“You don’t want to pull into the pits,” Ricciardo (pictured above with team principal Laurent Mekies) said of the early pit stop. “You get the call and you know that this isn’t the thing to do, but you get the call late and there’s no time to question it. Because then if you miss a lap then it’s even worse.
“But as soon as I pulled in, the cars on softs had pulled in, we’re on a medium, let’s go. Let’s use our clear air, use the pace we’ve got, and then we come out in traffic and it’s just DRS train, and for what? We’re all then on the same tire… That was one of the worst ones that I’ve had in 250-something races — that was a long old frustrating race where I just had a lot of anger.
“We talk about strategies and that… but two cars jumped us at the start with a soft tire. That’s fine, let them go. They pit and we follow them. To then just be on their strategy… We would have had clear air and a chance to [score], I think, from what I understand of Yuki’s race.
“Honestly, I was expecting more. On the in-lap I was waiting for, ‘Sorry. We f****d up.’ And I didn’t get it. So, that made me even more angry.”
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Tsunoda did not make his first pit stop for another 22 laps, going on to finish ninth on a one-stop strategy. Ricciardo says the timing of the result was particularly painful, having highlighted the importance of the two races before the summer break for his future.
“That’s the thing — I feel like we’ve taken ourselves out of the race so early and then we’re expected to fight a car that’s coming a second a lap quicker on newer tires and it’s, ‘What do you want me to do?’
“We just made it so difficult for ourselves when we had pace and we could have just stayed out in clear air, stayed calm and do what we’d done all weekend. We did a race but we didn’t do a race, if you know what I mean. We were just driving around.”