A ‘Seb spin’ was ‘salt in the wound’ for Ricciardo after dismal Sunday

Daniel Ricciardo says a “Seb spin” was “salt in the wounds” after a difficult 70th Anniversary Grand Prix on Sunday.

Starting fifth, the Australian had visions of potentially challenging for a podium at Silverstone to add to his P4 from a week earlier, but instead he would slip back down the field into the fight with teammate Esteban Ocon and the McLarens.

The icing on the cake though was when Ricciardo did a 180′ in his Renault under acceleration while side-by-side with Carlos Sainz out of Village, ending all hopes of points.

“Unfortunately, the last few years it’s a bit of a ‘Seb spin’ when you’re the inside car, then as soon as you get on the throttle you lose it,” he said, talking to The Race post-race.

“He did it with me in Austin in 2018. It’s one I don’t think I’d experienced yet.

“I could see Carlos and you’re trying to squeeze a little bit but not have contact, and then as soon as I opened the wheel and then got on throttle.

“But when you are in such close vicinity to another car on that side angle, you lose a chunk of downforce that’s normally coming in from that side and keeping the car down so I think it’s just a very quick loss of downforce and it can obviously catch you out,” Ricciardo explained.

“It was a little bit of salt in the wounds. By that point we were already on the back foot, I don’t want to say it was over but then with that I just wanted to roll over a little bit and just put my head down! Not a fun afternoon in the end.”

Ultimately P14 would be where Ricciardo finished and he admits it was a missed opportunity for more points.

“We set ourselves up well in qualifying, but obviously didn’t convert,” he said.

“It started falling away after the first stint. I don’t think we were crazy fast in the beginning but I think we were doing decent enough to hang in that fight with Racing Point.

“Stroll got me on the fast lap, then we were able to run with them and pull away a little bit from the cars behind but then we pitted for the medium and that set just didn’t work, it fell apart very quickly and soon enough we had to pit again for the hard.

“So that lost us a lot of track position and then obviously I had that spin trying to defend with Carlos. It kind of snowballed a bit away from us.

“In the briefing now, in hindsight, we go longer with the first stint and try to put the hard on and do a one-stop.”

But on a day when the hard tyre was the compound of choice, Ricciardo also revealed Renault had shot themselves in the foot in practice.

“I think actually we suffered with Friday,” he said. “We were the only team to run the hard and that seemed to have potentially hurt us a bit today.”