Daniel Ricciardo risks Red Bull anger as Aussie gets brutally honest
Daniel Ricciardo was left furious with his team after a mistake during the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Daniel Ricciardo was furious after the Hungarian Grand Prix in which the VCARB driver found himself on the wrong side of a questionable strategy decision. After a poor start, the Faenza-based team brought him in a lap after his closest rivals, costing him positions to both Alex Albon and Kevin Magnussen.
The popular Aussie enjoyed a strong qualifying at the Hungaroring, putting his VCARB machine on the fifth row of the grid, in front of team-mate Yuki Tsunoda. However, after enduring a poor start on the soft compound tyre, an early overcut attempt left him struggling in P12, unable to make up ground on the cars in front.
While pulling his car into Parc Ferme at the end of the race, Ricciardo explained that he was ‘biting his tongue’ before pleading with race engineer Pierre Hamelin to back up his frustrations. The anger had not subsided when he climbed out of the cockpit.
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“I thought the same thing, honestly,” Ricciardo said. “You don’t want to pull in the pits. Like you get the call, and you know that this isn’t the thing to do, but you get the call late and there is no time to question it because then if you miss a lap, 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 a DRS train.
“And for what? We’re all then on the same tyre. That was one of the worst ones… worst ones I’ve had. In 250-something races that was a long frustrating race where I just had a lot of anger.”
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And Ricciardo has risked angering his bosses at Red Bull after publicly admitting he was furious not to have received an apology from his team. He said: "I've had a lot of races, I've had a lot of frustrating ones, but that's up there, because we had the pace...
"Honestly, I was expecting more. On the in lap, I was waiting for: 'Sorry, we f***ed up.' And I didn't get it. So that made me even more angry."
Ricciardo was then asked if the context surrounding the Hungarian Grand Prix and the upcoming race in Belgium made this outcome even more frustrating. He replied: “Yeah that’s the thing. I feel like we’d 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 tyres.
“What do you want me to do? It’s like… we just made it so difficult for ourselves when we had pace and we could have just stayed out, clear air, stay calm and do what we’d done all weekend. So yeah, we did a race today, but we didn’t do a race, if you know what I mean. We were just driving around.”
Ricciardo now heads to Spa-Francorchamps knowing that his performance could set the course for the remainder of his F1 career. With Sergio Perez’s future looking increasingly precarious, the Aussie faces a shootout with Tsunoda and Liam Lawson to join Max Verstappen for the remainder of the 2024 campaign.
