Red Bull satisfied to see smaller gap to Mercedes
Red Bull Racing's Daniel Ricciardo finished third again at the Monaco GP, close behind the second Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton. Sebastian Vettel however had to retire from the race early on with the turbo.
Daniel Ricciardo, 3rd: “The race really came to life towards the end. It started off not so well and it’s a really short run to Turn 1, so that was frustrating. Then we got Seb due to his reliability and Kimi had a puncture and we sort of got back to where we were hoping to be. After the re-start we were just saving the tyres to the point that we could get to the end and then, with 20 laps to go, I thought they would be okay so I pushed. It was the first time in the whole race that I felt like I was really driving the car and we caught Lewis. It was fun but I couldn’t get him, so I have to say the race finished better than it started.”
Sebastian Vettel, DNF: “It’s disappointing. I had a good start and then we lost boost pressure from the turbo, so I had no power and had to retire. The team did everything they could. I felt quite helpless in the car, so I was asking for an answer of what we could do, but there wasn’t anything at that stage. We fixed some problems yesterday with the ERS, but some more came today with the turbo, but we will move forwards and it will be good for us soon.”
Christian Horner, Team Principal: “First of all we have to apologise to Sebastian for an issue with his power unit. It’s frustrating that, after making a good start, his race came to a very premature end. Thereafter, Daniel benefited from a puncture from Kimi to get some free air and was able to run his own race. We closed down the gap to the Mercedes at the end and got very close to Lewis, but round the streets of Monte Carlo it’s always extremely difficult to overtake. It’s the closest we’ve been to Mercedes all year and it’s the first time we’ve been really racing them this season, so there are signs of progress and we’re certainly getting closer. Finally, congratulations to the Marussia team on getting their first points in Formula One. Scoring points in this business is never easy and for a new team that stuck at it and scored their first points today, they deserve a large amount of recognition for that.”
Thierry Salvi, Renault: “Today was a very up and down day. Daniel fought throughout the race and was able to come close to Hamilton towards the end. It is a great result for him and showed yet again today that he’s strong enough to perform on such a difficult city track. For Seb he had a disaster today as he suffered a reliability failure from the power unit. We tried different settings to fix the problem but ultimately we had to retire. We’ll look into the causes tonight and in the coming days to fully understand what happened.”
