Daniel Ricciardo said he knew the moment he made his first pit stop in the Hungarian Grand Prix it was a tactical error.
The RB driver started ninth but finished three places further back after running just seven laps on his medium compound tyres at the start of the race. He spent the rest of the race on the hard compound.
Ricciardo admitted he had misgivings about the call to pit when it came on lap seven. “You don’t want to pull in the pits,” he told the official F1 channel.
“You get the call and you know this isn’t the thing to do. But you get the call late and there’s no time. There’s no time to question it because then if you miss a lap, it’s even worse.”
He said the team should have left him out to use more of the life from his tyres. “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 and use the pace we’ve got. And then we come out in traffic and it’s just DRS train and for what? We’re all then on the same tyre.”
He described his afternoon as “one of the worst I’ve had in 250-something races. That was a long, old frustrating race where I just had a lot of lot of anger.”
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Ricciardo’s team mate Yuki Tsunoda started one place behind him but ran until lap 29 on his medium tyres and completed his race with a single pit stop. In contrast Ricciardo “felt like we’d taken ourself out of the race so early.”
“We’re expected to fight a car that’s coming a second a lap quicker on newer tyres. What do you what do you want me to do?
“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’ve done all weekend. So we did a race today but we didn’t do a race if you know what I mean. We were just driving around.”
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2024 Hungarian Grand Prix
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