Penalty for hitting Stroll was “completely fair”

Daniel Ricciardo had no complaints over his penalty for colliding with Lance Stroll during the Hungarian Grand Prix.

The McLaren driver was given a five-second time penalty, and two penalty points on his licence, after colliding with his rival at turn two.

The collision occured after Stroll switched to soft tyres. Ricciardo, who was running on hard tyres at the time, knew it was going to be difficult to keep the Aston Martin behind him.

“To be honest, as soon as I heard he was on a soft out of the pits, I was like, ‘oh no, this is going to be tough’. And I saw his traction out of [turn] one, and I honestly didn’t even want to kind of go into [turn] two with him because I knew that he would just cruise around the outside.”

Ricciardo said he tried to avoid colliding with Stroll in turn two. “I’d even kind of braked early because I knew if I went in hard, I was going to do exactly what I did. I felt like I gave him margin and it still wasn’t enough.

“As soon as I turned, I felt it lock and I knew exactly what was going to happen. So obviously no issue with the penalty there, that was completely fair.”

The pair discussed the collision in the paddock afterwards. “He knew straight away he goes ‘yeah, I know, the hard was a mess’ and had a bit of a laugh. But obviously it doesn’t change what happened.”

The hard tyre “never really worked”, said Ricciardo. “You might get a bit of temp in it and then we obviously had blue flags and you lose it. And so just simply, I never got it going. The medium was okay at times, but just tricky. And the soft at the beginning was nowhere.”

The penalty left Ricciardo 15th at the end of the race, and moved him onto a total of four penalty points.

Despite his disappointing day, Ricciardo took some satisfaction from passing both Alpine drivers in a single move through turns two and three, which he celebrated on the radio.

“It was some of the only chatter I had today because unfortunately we were going backwards most of the time,” he said.

“It got me gee’d up for a little bit because I could kind of see it transpiring. I knew Alonso was struggling a bit on the hard, I saw Ocon come out and I was like, they might battle a bit here and I might be able to collect one of them. But then I saw them drift, drift, drift and I thought ‘maybe I can get both’, and I did. Two for one’s not common so I thought I would get a little bit of screen time.”