Ricciardo feels "content and fulfilled" after Spa F1 race
EIght-time F1 race winner Daniel Ricciardo insists that he feels "content and fulfulled" after the Belgian Grand Prix that saw him claim a single championship point.
Daniel Ricciardo was the only driver to start on the softs, coming in for his first pit stop early as a result. Pitting early again second time around, that undercut him past some rivals but late on, Ocon was able to get past on tyres that were nine laps younger.
Ricciardo later was promoted to P10 following the disqualification for race-winner George Russell, meaning he did leave Belgium with a point after all.
“Today was very similar to yesterday; I’m quite pleased as I feel like we had a really strong two-stop race, but unfortunately so did some others and I think they had a bit more pace than us, so it wasn’t good enough to get rewarded.
"Esteban (Ocon) was generally a bit quicker and also had fresher tyres, so I’m disappointed with our final result, as we tried our best to keep the tenth place in the last few laps.
"It was a positive weekend and I’m leaving Spa content and fulfilled, which pleases me entering the summer break. Looking ahead after the break, I’m excited to get back to Zandvoort and we’ll keep the momentum going from the last few races.”
Having served a 60-place grid penalty for exceeding his engine allocation, Yuki Tsunoda started down the back. The Japanese driver was always going to struggle to make much headway given the tight nature of the midfield.
Tsunoda insists that his VCARB01 has lacked pace all through the weekend, and he indicated that him feeling uncomfortable in the car was down to extrenal issues which the team will investigate.
“We’ve been struggling for pace this weekend and also during the race today. I haven’t been feeling fully comfortable and it seems there was something going on from what I heard from my engineers after the race, so we’ll sit down together and look through the data.
"The strategy didn’t work out for us today, but we always knew it would be challenging given our starting position. We’ll keep pushing as a team and do as much as we can to maintain our position in the constructors as it remains a tight midfield," noted the Japanese driver.
