Yuki Tsunoda was pleased with crash recovery to points in F1 Hungarian GP, but Daniel Ricciardo was left angry due to wrong strategy.
It was a wild Saturday for Visa Cash App RB’s Tsunoda in F1 Hungarian GP, who saw himself face a hard task for Sunday’s race. Fortunately for the Japanese driver, he made it in Q3 and was able to start 10th, even with the repair work carried out.
The team fixed and used old parts to avoid getting in penalties, which included older parts of the power unit from the pool. To add to it, the team went for a bold one-stop strategy for Tsunoda, which actually worked out for them to eke out a points result.
“Definitely, I am very happy with my race and obviously big credit to the team and the mechanics who repaired my car very fast and precisely overnight, without that I wouldn’t be here,” said Tsunoda to TV media. “A big thanks to them. To be honest, we didn’t expect to do one stop, that was not even our conversation.
“But fair to say, we did a really good job with tyre management and obviously the suggestions from engineer and everything, we communicated well and those things in the end played very good. We just have to continue like this and yeah the car is in a good shape which is most important thing,” summed up Tsunoda.
While the Japanese driver found his race to be near perfect, his teammate Ricciardo was livid from early in the grand prix. Having started on the medium, the idea was to go long but the team pitted him early along with the drivers who started on the soft tyres.
That put him in the same bracket as them with no advantage. Ricciardo was expecting a sorry during the race, which didn’t come. And there was no time for him to react and disobey the pit call, which eventually sealed his fate in the race.
Ricciardo reckons it eventually did help his teammate Tsunoda to undertake the one-stop and score the points. “Massively, why they pitted me when they did at the beginning – we followed the soft cars in,” he said to media. “They’ve just come in, we have a clear track and we decide to pit behind them and put ourselves in a DRS train – and on the same tyre, all on the hard.
“I mean, look I’ve had a lot of races, I’ve had a lot of frustrating ones, but that’s up there, because we had the pace, we basically gave Yuki the race that we had in front of us, and we both could have done that, and we didn’t. I didn’t have time, it was a late call and was box, box, box. But honestly, as soon as I’m pulling in the pits, I’m questioning, but you can’t – you get called in Turn 13 and you have to react.
“We talk about strategies in that, but two cars jumped us at the start with a soft tyre. That’s fine. Let them go. They pit and we follow them, to then just be on their strategy. We would have had clear air and a chance to – I think, from what I understand – do Yuki’s race. Honestly, I was expecting more.
“On the in lap, I was waiting for: ‘sorry, we fucked up.’ And I didn’t get it. So that made me even more angry,” summed up Ricciardo. The Australian felt that they both could have scored points and disallow Aston Martin from scoring as they had the pace to do it.
Towards the end, Ricciardo was asked to defend from a fast-charging Lance Stroll, but the Australian had nothing left. In fact, the Canadian did come close to beating Tsunoda after ending just 0.717s behind. “Cars had already pitted, I mean for us to pit, I don’t understand,” he said.
“We had a medium, the tyres are going to go, so lets just use them. I don’t know if by doing that, it allowed Yuki to get points but from my understanding, both could have done it, we were both quick enough, we had the pace all weekend. So, that’s…unless I am missing something, I really don’t think…I guess I’ll hear all about it in the next hour.
“In the last stint, Stroll’s catching me a second a lap and maybe more, and they’re saying, it’s really important to keep him behind, and what do you want me to do? You’ve pitted me so early, I’m on older tyres. I’m also being expected to fight when we’re not really in a fight anymore. So that was also frustrating. There were times where I just felt like we… the bed was made and so it was frustrating.”
Here’s how F1 Hungarian GP panned out
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