ANALYSIS: RB achieves quickest pit stop with Ricciardo

While this year's race for the DHL fastest pit stops has been dominated by Red Bull and Ferrari, it was the Faenza-based RB outfit to perform the quickest tyre change at the Hungarian Grand Prix.

Starting from P9 on the grid, Ricciardo and his team had wanted to achieve some decent points and maybe even attack the Aston Martins further up the field, but Ricciardo’s hopes came to naught after just seven laps. First, he lost two places at the start, and then RB’s strategists found themselves making an almighty cock-up as far as tactics are concerned.

They brought Ricciardo in for the first of two stops on Lap 7. The pit stop meant that the Australian rejoined the track behind slower cars, and he spent the majority of the race in traffic. Moreover, he started the race on Pirelli's mediums, and he was thus unable to exploit the full grip of the yellow-banded tyres on his unusually short opening stint.

“Today it was a long and frustrating race," started Ricciardo. "We didn’t use the pace we had in the clear air. We were on the mediums at the start of the race and after only a few laps we pitted for new hards together with the other cars who started on softs, coming out in traffic.

"It’s even more frustrating because we were quick all weekend, and I felt like we have taken ourselves out of the race so early as we couldn’t fight cars that were coming much quicker on newer tyres," stated the understandably very frustrated Ricciardo.

Despite his frustration and the crucial strategy mistake, the Italian squad performed the quickest pit stop of the entire race. The RB mechanics only required 2.01 seconds to change tyres on Ricciardo's VCARB01.

An apology of sorts came later from team boss Laurent Mekies: “Unfortunately, we got it wrong with Daniel and pitted him too early in heavy traffic, which lost him a chance to fight for points.

"His pace had been extremely strong all weekend long, and he demonstrated that again in the final stint of the race when he was finally able to find some free air and fight his way back. We certainly share his frustration, and we will learn and come back stronger next week.”

Red Bull performed the second quickest stop with Sergio Perez (2.08s), while Alpine surprisingly registered the third and fourth-quickest tyre change.

Following a series of mediocre pit stops in recent years, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff had vowed to work on this aspect. The German-British outfit has delivered once again in Hungary, performing the fifth and sixth quickest stop.

Ferrari needed quick stops during their crucial battles with Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen at the Hungarian Grand Prix. However, the Scuderia was not in top form in terms of tyre changes with Charles Leclerc's stops taking a bit longer than wished. The Italian outfit completed its quickest stop when they serviced Carlos Sainz within 2.40s.