RB’s Daniel Ricciardo left Hungaroring without any points in a race that may be important in deciding his future in Formula 1. Despite qualifying in ninth, ahead of teammate Yuki Tsunoda who crashed in Q3 during Saturday’s qualifying session, the Australian finished the Grand Prix in a frustrating P12 — outside the points.
The 35-year-old led Tsunoda during his short stint with the medium tyres. They both lost two places at the start as Albon and Magnussen overtook them using the soft compound.
However, they had gained them back as the Williams and Haas drivers pitted on lap 6. Bizarrely, RB brought Ricciardo in a tour later to try and cover that. But that left him towards the back of a train involving Hülkenberg, Alonso, Stroll Albon, Magnussen and himself. His chances of points were gone.
To compound things, he only did 21 laps on his first set of hards when the team called him in again, forcing the 8-time winner to do a 41-lap stint on his last set of tyres.
His Japanese teammate finished the race in ninth, while Ricciardo had to settle for P12, 25 seconds behind his teammate.
If RB had followed the same strategy and done a 1-stop with both drivers, P9 and P10 looked to be on the table.
Speaking after the race, Ricciardo did not hide his disappointment of his Sunday afternoon, declaring it to be hugely disappointing as his team got things badly wrong.
“Massively. Why they pitted me when they did at the beginning was…
“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.
“They’ve just come in, we have a clear track, and we decide to pit behind them and put ourselves in a DRS train. And it’s like, then on the same tyre, all on a hard, so…”
Ricciardo did not have the time to question his race engineer Pierre Hamelin and simply obliged with their instructions. He explained he was in the penultimate corner when got the order.
“It’s a late call, ‘box box box’ and [then] you pitted. But honestly, as soon as I’m pulling in the pits, I’m questioning. But you can’t [argue the call this late]. You know, you get called in turn 13, and you have to react.”
With Stroll on 17-lap fresher boots and looking to chase down Yuki Tsunoda later in the race, RB asked Ricciardo to defend hard to help his teammate.
However, with an enormous tyre disadvantage, he was a sitting duck.
“Then, Stroll’s catching me a second a lap and maybe more, and they’re saying, ‘you know, it’s really important to keep him behind’, and [I was like] ‘what do you want me to do? You’ve pitted me so early, I’m on older tyres’.
“I’m also being expected to fight when we’re not really in a fight anymore. So that was also frustrating. There were times when I just felt like we… the bed was made.”
Tsunoda’s points finish shows what could have been for Ricciardo had the team nailed the strategy.
The man tipped to potentially replace Sergio Pérez at Red Bull if the Mexican is removed was expecting that the team would apologise for “fucking up” his race, as he enquired on the radio after the chequered flag.
The response from his engineer was that they will speak about it in the debrief afterwards.
“We had the pace and we basically gave Yuki the race that we had in front of us. And we both could have done that. And we didn’t.
“Honestly, I was expecting more. On the in-lap I was waiting for ‘Sorry, we fucked up’. And I didn’t get it. So that made me even more angry.”
Laurent Mekies, the team principal of RB admitted that the team made a mistake with Ricciardo’s strategy and they had failed to capitalise on his strong pace all weekend long.
“Unfortunately, we got it wrong with Daniel and pitted him too early in heavy traffic, which lost him a chance to fight for points.
“His pace had been extremely strong all weekend long, and he demonstrated that again in the final stint of the race when he was finally able to find some free air and fight his way back.
“We certainly share his frustration, and we will learn and come back stronger next week.”
Ricciardo remains 13th in the Drivers’ Championship with 11 points.
