Communication error spoiled Ricciardo's stop, says Horner
Red Bull boss Christian Horner says Daniel Ricciardo's disastrous pit stop in the Monaco GP was caused by a miscommunication within the team.
The plan had been to put the Australian in soft tires and when a set of supersoft tires was requested by the engineers it was realised too late that they were at the back of the garage, and thus not immediately to hand, Ricciardo lost over 10 seconds compared with a normal stop, and lost his chance to take the lead from Lewis Hamilton.
"Obviously Lewis had elected to stay on the extreme tires and go straight to the slicks," said Horner. "And the lap he went to the slicks he put the ultrasoft tire on, and we knew that was our window of opportunity to get back past him, so Daniel was extremely quick on his in-lap.
"He was about seven seconds/eight seconds quicker than Lewis was on his equivalent out lap, and having seen Mercedes put on the ultrasoft, the call was made in plenty of time -- or what I felt was certainly plenty of time for us to go one step harder on compound, so to go on to the supersoft, so if we were to come out behind Lewis, it wasn't clear at that point in the lap how much up or down he was going to be, we felt that tire had better range.
"So the call was made to go to the supersoft tire, the red sidewall tire, and based on how we are set up here in Monaco, the pit wall is upstairs and the garage is downstairs, the tires are on heat both in the garage and behind the garage, and unfortunately the set of tires that were called for were not readily to hand and were at the back of the garage and there was a scramble with the mechanics originally having the soft tire ready, the yellow tire, when that change was requested to go to the super soft, those tires were actually right at the back of the garage and couldn't be got to the car in time, which cost probably about 10 seconds in the stop.
"Not making excuses because there are none -- but tightness of the garage, it is very tight to have extreme wets, intermediates and three different types of slicks for both cars in the garage at one time and it is a communication error that has happened at short notice with 30 seconds notice that on a normal working day would have been no issue at all."
Horner said the team had to apologize to Ricciardo.
"Despite that delay they came out alongside each other, showing how quick Daniel's in lap had been and how slow Lewis' out lap had been so it was gutting for the whole team to lose a victory like that and as a team we win together and we lose together and all we can do is apologize to Daniel that we haven't given him a good enough service today, having done a great job with him yesterday to get the pole, he had done everything right in the race.
"Even going to the intermediates it was the right way to get going about things to get to the slicks, but unfortunately this communication error between the pit wall upstairs and the tire management has let us down today."
