It has been seen that Daniel Ricciardo is feeling really bitter over the strategy which his Red Bull team mate Max Verstappen took for defeating him. The Australian said, “I’m a bit devastated. A big part of me is happy the team are on winning form but it’s hard to celebrate”.
He further said, “To not be on the podium sucks. I will pull the guys aside who I need to ask them what the deal was today.”
When the decision was handed, lead was given to Verstappen despite of the pressure he was having from Kimi Raikkonen from Ferrari. Daniel Riccaiardo said, “I don’t want to come across as a bad sportsman. Whatever happened on track, Max crossed the line first.
“Sure, it is every man for himself and I’m bitter, but not at Max, he did what he had to do, but I’m bitter at the situation.” According to Christian Horner, the team boss, there came a split between the drivers by Red Bull as they both were under pressure from Sebastian Vettel and Raikkonen. Horner said, “It was always going to be tricky to keep the Ferraris behind us,” Horner said.
“In clean air, Ferrari probably had a slight car advantage on us.
“We elected to split the strategies because it wasn’t obvious which was going to be the quicker route, the three-stop or the two-stop, and we felt Sebastian in clean air looked to be the fastest car and we were asking: ‘How do we beat Vettel?’
“We felt by splitting our strategies it gave us both options because we knew the two-stop was going to be under a lot of pressure at the end of the race in terms of degradation. Max looked after his tyres incredibly well to make sure he had just enough left to fend off Kimi in the last few laps. Max’s performance has been exemplary. The biggest aspect has been his calmness. He has a lot of capacity when driving the car. He is a young man completely in control of what he was doing. He did a 27.5 on his first flying lap and since then he has not put a wheel wrong all weekend.”
