The safety cars handicapped Red Bull

If Daniel Ricciardo was obviously satisfied to step onto the second step of the podium, he believes that the timing of the two safety cars prevented him from being able to truly threaten his former teammate, Sebastian Vettel, for the victory: « At the start, Seb took off but I was catching up to him. I think if there hadn’t been the safety car, we could have been quite close. Attempting the undercut would have been possible during the pit stop. Making both stops under the safety car regime clearly affected our chances, and I think it really dictated the race. »

The Australian could still be satisfied with making it back onto the podium and setting the fastest lap of the race, indicating that his car was truly competitive, even until the end of the race.

For Daniil Kvyat, the timing of the safety car’s entrance couldn’t have been worse since both times it happened just after the Russian made his own pit stop under green flag conditions. This cost him positions he could not recover on the track: “I wasn’t lucky with the safety car since I pitted one lap before it came out. It seems the safety car didn’t like me today. It must be something personal! But that’s life. It was against us, and it wasn’t a good race for me, but there was nothing we could do. I lost two places to the Mercedes after the first stop and lost one place to Bottas at the second.”

On a circuit where it is very difficult to overtake without a significant performance gap, it was therefore almost impossible for the Russian to do better than fifth.