Daniel Ricciardo: “It was a crazy race…”

Daniel Ricciardo survived contact with thee other drivers to take third place in Hungary, despite one of the incidents forcing him to pit for a new nose.

Ricciardo touched Valterri Bottas on the third lap, and was later involved with incidents with both Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg while fighting for position.

Red Bull had looked competitive all weekend at a track where ultimate power is less important.

“It was a crazy race,” said Ricciardo. “Already from the start, the first corner there was pretty big contact with, I think, Bottas, and the front of the car jumped and I thought we’d damaged something. It was quite a big hit.

“But then we seemed to still have relatively good pace. I saw Dany in front was struggling, so then the team decided to, let’s say, let me go through. I was saying I was faster and knew we could do better pace. So then we got quickly past the Force India and then quickly back past Bottas with some good moves. Then the pace was pretty good. At the restart we had the Option, that was an advantage. That was pretty much an advantage from yesterday by only using the Prime in Q1 so were able to take advantage of that today I guess.”

Ricciardo was then hit by Hamilton: “Then the restart, I just tried to go around the outside of Lewis. You don’t see much in the cars. Obviously your peripheral vision’s pretty limited but I just felt him come in, so I just assumed he’d locked the front wheel and slid up into me, so we had more damage after that. I saw the right sidepod flapping around. Nonetheless, we’re in third.

“I saw the pace was good, we were catching Seb and Nico and I was close – but not close enough – to Nico and obviously they’re not so slow on the straights. The laps were ticking down, I had to try something and I got a pretty good run out of the last corner and yeah, just said ‘I’m going for it this lap, no matter what,’ and I went for it.”

The pair made contact on the exit of Turn One after Ricciardo had tried to pass.

“To be honest, the move, it was, for sure, late but it was clean. Up until the apex it was fine. Obviously Nico saw me and left me room on the entry and then, just the exit, from what I recall he just came back across and just basically didn’t give me enough room. I don’t know if he thought he’d cleared me yet – but we made contact and that was when he earned a puncture and I got the front wing damage.”

Like other drivers, Ricciardo said he’d had Jules Bianchi on his mind this week.

“As all the drivers have said, this race was for Jules. I left everything on the track. Whether some competitors like it or not, that’s how I wanted to do it and that’s how I’ll always do it. And watching Jules grow up, that was how he did it. He had amazing race craft and made some pretty impressive lunges. I drove inspired today and I’m happy to be standing up here. It’s been an emotional week.”