Red Bull boss Horner explains how Ricciardo won from 10th
Red Bull boss Christian Horner says Daniel Ricciardo’s victory in a “crazy” Azerbaijan made up for the frustration of Max Verstappen’s early retirement with an engine failure.
Ricciardo had to make a premature first pit stop to remove debris from a brake duct, and he subsequently drove from 17th to score a surprise victory.
“It was a total crazy race,” said Horner. “Looking back to the early part of the race, we obviously picked up a bit of debris with Daniel after the start, from the incident between Bottas and Raikkonen, that got stuck in his front-right brake duct. And had to make a call to box him, get rid of the debris and change the tires, which put him at the back of the field and effectively out of contention.
“At that point in time, Max was looking really strong, he was finding rhythm, he was putting Perez under a lot of pressure to get into P3, the leaders were just up the road ahead. And then a sudden engine failure. That at the moment is unexplained. So we'll need to look through what's left of the engine to try and understand what happened there.
“Again, another mega restart, up to third, and then obviously he benefitted from the incident between Sebastian and Lewis, and then Lewis's headrest issue. He had a little bit of luck today to get himself track position in the lead. And then the last 15 or 20 laps did a perfect way to round out a Grand Prix. So, really happy for him to have won the race, our 53rd grand prix victory, obviously hugely disappointed for Max and keen to understand what the cause of the failure was.”
While luck played a part in the victory, Horner was also boosted by the pace shown in qualifying, even if Verstappen only started fifth.
“I think more encouraging was that really, with yesterday's performance, we felt we really under delivered to be where we were on the grid. And there was a lap from Max that, on that last lap, where he was sort of close to four tenths up before Turn 7 and a mistake there, and that would've put him a comfortable P3 on the grid, not far off Valtteri's time.
“And you could see in the race again, he had great pace. I think we have improved the car, we are going in the right direction. Montreal, Baku and Austria are three of the circuits that we're wariest of and we had a podium, running second and a retirement in Montreal, we had a Grand Prix victory in Baku. And again it could've been quite easily a 1-2 finish today. So I think things are definitely moving in the right direction.
“I think chassis-wise we're getting in a decent position, you can see the level of downforce we're running compared to our competitors, and sector two all weekend we've looked really competitive. So I think that's particularly encouraging. Renault are doing what they can and hopefully, we desperately need more performance and reliability, but bit by bit that's coming, we've got some more fuel coming. I'm hopeful that the second half of the season for us, should be certainly stronger than the first half.
“That's our target, is to get into a generally competitive position. And you know there'll be some venues that'll come up that allow us to do that. Monaco we looked really strong, considering Montreal and Azerbaijan are two of our absolute weakest, you know, we've been closer, relatively, than we thought we would be.”
Horner admitted that Renault has some work to do on reliability: “The two failures that Max has were totally unrelated, this was a sudden loss of oil pressure and they don't like not having oil in them. Renault need to do the right post-mortem and understand what the right cause of failure is. The cause of failure that we had in Montreal was nothing to do with performance.
“I think you can't fault the people on the floor and behind the scenes that are pushing hard. And as a race team we're always impatient to have more performance and better reliability. And today was looking pretty depressing on about lap 15. Ten laps later the world was looking a bit different.”
