“Angry” Daniel Ricciardo left waiting for “sorry, we f****** up” admission
“That made me even more angry..."
Daniel Ricciardo could not hide his anger at his own team, after one of the most frustrating races of his career.
Ricciardo qualified ninth at the F1 Hungarian Grand Prix which teased an impressive Sunday, when he could have piled pressure on Red Bull to swap him with the under-pressure Sergio Perez.
But RB opted to pit Ricciardo early, after seven laps while he was on medium tyres - a strategy call which he disagreed with. He finished 12th.
“I’m really trying to bite my tongue, but you must know how I feel about the first stop,” he said via team radio at the Hungaroring.
“We followed the soft cars in,” Ricciardo said.
“They've just come in. We have a clear track and we decided to get behind them and put ourselves in a DRS train.
“I've had a lot of races, and I've had a lot of frustrating races. But that's up there.
“We had the pace and we basically gave Yuki the race that we had in front of us. We both could have done that, and we didn't.”
Ricciardo raged about the ill-timed pitstop: “Honestly, as soon as I'm pulling in the pits I'm questioning it. But you can't...
“You get called in Turn 13 and you have to react.
“We talk about strategies but two cars jumped us at the start with a soft tyre. 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, I think from what I understand, do Yuki's race.
“Honestly, I was expecting more. On the in-lap I was waiting for ‘sorry, we f***** up', and I didn't get it.
“That made me even more angry.”
Ricciardo is among the key candidates to be swapped with the under-fire Perez in the Red Bull.
F1’s constructors’ champions will sit down in the summer break to decide whether to stick with Perez, Helmut Marko confirmed.
Ricciardo and Liam Lawson are credible options if they opt to dispense with the Mexican.
That leaves Ricciardo with one more race, this weekend’s F1 Belgian Grand Prix, to impress.
