While Ricciardo has been dominating headlines all through the week for his rumoured move away from Red Bull, he was pretty low-key during today’s French GP.
Ricciardo has a pretty solid race all along but ended up being easily brushed aside by Raikkonen towards the end, thereby losing on a podium finish.
The race was going along smoothly for Ricciardo before it seemed like he was suffering from a loss of power.
However, it wasn’t really a loss of power that had brought his pace down, but an apparent damage to his front wing, something that the team informed him during his pit-stop.
“We had pretty good pace towards the end of that first stint and we were catching Max, and pulling away from Kimi at the time.
“Then when I pitted, the boys said the front left part of the wing was damaged and they think it happened just two laps before the pitstop.
“I started to all of a sudden get quite a lot of understeer. I don’t know if it was a failure or we hit some debris and that broke it.
“Already with the soft tyre we were struggling when we left the pits, and then a few laps later the team said the right part broke, so both parts identically seemed to break. Whether it was a failure or debris I don’t know yet.
“But it happened and we were slow because of that. We had a lot less downforce and understeering, so with Kimi he was always going to catch us with that pace…we were a wounded car from just before the first pitstop.” he added.
Christian Horner too confirmed that some debris might have hit the car, causing that front wing damage.
“The top two elements of the flap became ‘disbonded’,” he said.
“I think maybe some debris or something like that has hit it.
“But it has been a good haul of points for the team today would have been nice to have both of them on the podium.” he concluded.
