Daniel Ricciardo doesn’t have any ill feelings with Lance Stroll despite getting no apology, as he has moved on from the F1 Chinese GP incident.
It was a clumsy move from Aston Martin’s Stroll at the re-start in F1 Chinese GP which resulted in a DNF for Visa Cash App RB’s Ricciardo. His rear of the car was damaged hugely and subsequent no blame taking from the Canadian irked the Australian.
Stroll defended his radio call by noting that he wasn’t saying those things to Ricciardo, but the bunch up in the corner. But neither he nor Aston Martin team boss Mike Krack felt that the blame laid on the Canadian for a pretty normal incident that can happen.
Two weeks on, Ricciardo hasn’t spoken to Stroll and the Canadian hasn’t even texted anything to explain his side of things. The Australian doesn’t have that sort of ill feelings towards him and has kind of moved on from the incident.
“No. Well, I would say no, because I feel it’s not going to go anywhere,” said Ricciardo. “If he texted just saying, ‘Yeah, you know, my bad’, whatever. I can accept an apology, I’m not that much of an asshole. But the fact that there’s not even that… He clearly doesn’t think he did anything wrong. So I guess there’s not much to say.
“Obviously, if we sit next to each other in the drivers’ briefing and he wants to chat, I’m not going to ignore him or anything. When I was younger, yeah maybe I was more stubborn, didn’t always apologise for something that was my fault. I was just like ‘whatever’. But the last few years, if I take someone out or even if it’s 50/50, I’ll still say: ‘Look, maybe I could have done better, so sorry for ruining our day.’
“I remember I think it was maybe Kevin in Brazil [2023] or Yuki in Mexico the year before when I was still at McLaren in 2022, I didn’t honestly think I was fully at fault for that one but I still kind of was like ‘Alright, I’ll just text him, clear the air a little bit. Little things. I just don’t think we need, from my side at least… yeah, we’re all rivals but you don’t want to have a target, I guess, and you don’t need enemies.
“Like not going as far as saying he’s an enemy or anything. It’s an incident and we’ll move on but you don’t obviously want to get what you’re given and, again, I’m not directing this at him but it’s my approach and, of course, if I’ve got on track stuff with someone then let’s run it out and see what happens
“It doesn’t need to be anything so I’m not saying it will be but, in that position, if I didn’t see him in person I would at least say ‘Hey, man, sorry I was looking somewhere else’ or ‘You braked really hard, it caught me off guard’, whatever, just something but, yeah, it’s fine. I have moved on, obviously we’re talking about it, but I have certainly moved on,” summed up Ricciardo, who was more frustrated due to the penalty.
Since he overtook Haas’ Nico Hulkenberg under the safety car, the Australian was handed a three-place grid penalty for this weekend’s Miami GP. “I was frustrated with the three-place penalty, that one was like…yeah I put my hand up, I was frustrated, I should read the rules better but they saw it pretty black and white,” said Ricciardo.
“Nico did nothing wrong. For me, they were a little bit one-sided in that one. So yeah, I paid the price for that. So a little bit of fire to bring to the track this weekend.” On the other, Stroll tried to brush aside the topic when asked about the incident and subsequent talks if he wishes to with Ricciardo.
“I mean, it’s history now,” said Stroll. “I’m focused on this weekend. I don’t really want to go too much into detail about it. It was unfortunate, for sure. I was also trying to have a good race, and it was a very unfortunate ending to it, but just focused on Miami now. Not for this room. Those things are done behind closed doors.”
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Here’s Daniel Ricciardo with some harsh words for Lance Stroll
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