Christian Horner, the Team Principal of Red Bull seemed pleased with the overall performance of his two drivers at this weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix, with Daniel Ricciardo finishing second, and Max Verstappen sixth.
Horner commented that the result was: “a really exciting finish to a long and hard Grand Prix. Tyres and strategy were always going to be key to today and in the end opting to go to a three stop strategy with the tyres that we saved from earlier in the weekend brought Daniel tantalisingly close to Nico.”
The race turned out to be based upon strategy and pit stops, with Red Bull timing Ricciardo’s well in order to keep him well out in front of Lewis Hamilton.
“Lewis triggered the final round of pit stops with Kimi [Raikkonen] covering him and then us in turn covering Kimi. That gave Daniel roughly 27 seconds to hunt down Nico who did a good job to manage his pace to the end but Daniel drove an outstanding race to finish 0.5 seconds behind him, splitting the two Mercedes.”
However, Max Verstappen did not enjoy quite as much success as his team-mate, due to his third poor start in a row. The rest of the Dutchman’s race was then compromised by slower cars that he was caught up behind.
“Unfortunately for Max we had some clutch issues overnight which we thought we’d cured in time for the race, combined with an awful lot of wheel spin at the start, it cost him some time as did avoiding the (Nico Hulkenberg) accident.
“He was then stuck in traffic and burnt his tyres out fairly quickly in the first two stints. Once he was able to get in clean air he made some great passing moves and was able to make progress back up to P6.”
The results of the team did leave Horner optimistic for the coming races, feeling it was good to extend their advantage over Ferrari to 15 points.
“Overall a positive weekend, we’ve extended our lead over Ferrari in the Constructors’ Championship, we’ve scored another second place finish and produced an enthralling end to the Grand Prix.”
