Daniel Ricciardo hit out at his Red Bull team after poor timing severely hurt his final run in Q3, meaning he will start fifth for Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix.
The Australian was hoping to capitalise on a more competitive weekend for the Anglo-Austrian team, as he looked to repeat his pole from 12 months ago. Instead, he and team-mate Max Verstappen only benefitted from Lewis Hamilton’s problems as Red Bull remained the third best team.
Explaining where his team got it wrong, Ricciardo said: “We knew we needed to go hard on the out-laps, to get a clear lap out of the pits to warm the tyres up.
“[But] We came out in traffic, basically, so I couldn’t push on the out-lap on the last run.”
Later it emerged that traffic situation could have been avoided, with the 27-year-old adding: “It seemed like we had 20 seconds to Perez behind me so I don’t know why we didn’t go in that gap.
“Why we went out in traffic when we knew we needed a hard out lap, that was a pretty obvious mistake.
“I don’t know why we didn’t wait to put me out in clear air – unless the time was going down and we weren’t going to make it, which I don’t think was the case.
“I believe we had all the time we needed. It just seemed like we made a stupid, silly error.”
For Ricciardo, there was an eery sense of deja vu after a communication error meant his tyres were not ready for a pit stop 12 months ago, costing him a very likely race win.
“It seems like sometimes the intensity of Monaco makes you lose a bit of concentration and make what seem to be pretty obvious errors,” Ricciardo lamented.
“It’s not intentional, it’s just frustrating. We underachieved way too much and this race is an opportunity for us to do much better than that.
“We could have challenged everyone, but that means nothing now because we’re not there. We were very far from the potential, so that’s the frustrating part.
“This is the one that you don’t want to make silly or simple errors at. You want to put more emphasis on Saturday than Sunday here, it’s not the day you want to make those errors.”
