Daniel Ricciardo, a rising star who jumped from Red Bull to Renault, complained about its team under performance.
Renault and Ricciardo failed to any points in Barcelona during Spanish Grand Prix.
The team was only able to push for a position ahead of where they started. They had to start at 13th position after accommodating a grid penalty of 3 positions to the Aussie, who accidentally reversed into Daniil Kvyat at Baku.
However, he was astonished when Carlo Sainz was able to finish ahead of Ricciardo at 8 position on his home ground, four places ahead of the Aussie.
Sainz, Spanish driver, drivers for McLaren was driving with the same power unit with which Renault’s Ricciardo struggled on track.
Sainz later revealed that irrespective of his race results he had “no pace” and struggled with his power unit.
“I’m frustrated, to be honest with that,” said Ricciardo. “I see Carlos was eighth, we had him at the end of the first stint and then we fitted a hard, he fitted a medium and he passed us on the out-lap.
“And obviously, look at where he finished and where he did with his pace. To be honest I think we underachieved with the result that the car is capable of.
“It’s just little things, and this midfield is so tight, a small lack of perfection and we potentially miss four points.
“We’ve just got to try and do better, I guess, try and figure out what we can execute and understand, why we fitted the hard instead of the medium, and if that was us being too cautious then let’s not be cautious.”
Ricciardo took decisions strategize for the race and decided to pit like most drivers did during safety car period. His team mate, Nico Hulkenberg, decided not to pit and carried on which resulted in Aussie on the tail.
This costed him his position and was unable to recover after the safety car was removed because he couldn’t challenge the like of Romain Grosjean, Kyvat and Albon.
“I think where we missed out was the restart, we lost track position again [by] pitting, and then we fell behind Nico and he was on a used tyre – I was on a new – and I think we had a chance on that first lap to attack the guys in front,” he added.
“We were told we were able to fight, but I couldn’t really see him advancing with that tyre as I could with mine.
“Again we’ll see now, sort it out if strategically we could have maximised one car over the other”.
