Daniel Ricciardo says he’ll buy George Russell a beer to thank him for inadvertently helping him finish seventh in yesterday’s race.
The McLaren driver was running seventh in the closing stages but knew he would have to take a 10-second time penalty after the race which was imposed for his collision with Yuki Tsunoda. Ricciardo was therefore pressing on to extend his lead over Esteban Ocon in eighth place.
However in the final laps Russell, running fourth, drew close enough to Ricciardo that the McLaren driver feared he would be shown blue flags to make way for the Mercedes, which was a lap ahead of him. Doing that would have cost Ricciardo time and potentially left him less than 10 seconds ahead of Ocon, costing him a position.
But to Ricciardo’s relief, Russell pitted with two laps to go in order to fit fresh tyres and attempt to claim the bonus point for fastest lap. Ricciardo therefore held on to his seventh place.
“In the last few laps I was pretty nervous because George was so close to getting a blue flag for me and I knew I would lose a couple of seconds with that and that would have dropped me back into Ocon,” said Ricciardo. “So I was pushing like hell just to try and hold that two-second gap.
“Then when I heard he pitted for fastest lap, I was like… he probably doesn’t think it or know it, but I’ll buy him a beer anyways!”
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Ricciardo disagreed with the stewards’ decision that he was entirely to blame for the collision with Tsuonda, which ended the AlphaTauri driver’s race. “I’ve seen a few replays, I’ll take more of the responsibility but certainly I don’t feel it’s 100 to zero in terms of my fault,” he said.
The McLaren driver said he wasn’t attempting to overtake Tsunoda when he took a speculative look up the inside at turn six.
“I didn’t lock [the brakes], I stayed on the apex. The truth is, I didn’t actually plan or want to overtake him there – I mean, of course, I’d love to overtake him – but I wasn’t into that corner to out-brake him and overtake him.
“I just thought if I stay there all the grip’s on the inside of that corner, it’s very dusty. So I thought if I could just stay there, keep him a bit on the dirty line, I’ll get a better exit. And we probably needed to give each other 20, 30 more centimetres and we were fine. Probably not even that.
“So I wish it didn’t happen and I’m sorry…
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