“I think we played well as a team”.
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Nico Rosberg insists he is not struggling with a lack of self-belief despite seeing Lewis Hamilton turn his 43-point championship lead into a 19-point deficit by virtue of the Briton’s fourth consecutive victory on Sunday.
Ricciardo has not enjoyed a great deal of success at the German Grand Prix in the past, as his sixth-place finish in 2014 is the only time he has managed to collect any points at the Hockenheimring.
“What a race, what a fantastic start”.
“Without the penalty I was in front of the Red Bulls; with the penalty I couldn’t challenge them”. I was very surprised by the penalty, I didn’t expect it at all. We fitted the supersoft, the new tyre, on to Max [at the first stop] to try to cover Rosberg, and took a different route with Daniel, fitting the soft tyre.
Speaking about the incident with Rosberg, Verstappen felt the Mercedes driver deliberately didn’t leave him room.
“Daniel and I have a good relationship so we can do that”, Verstappen told Sky F1.
Then in Australia this year, Verstappen had a series of heated team radio exchanges as he was annoyed Toro Rosso chose to bring Sainz in first, despite the teenager being ahead.
“I’m disappointed because I had an awesome qualifying and I was really optimistic I could bring it home, so I am just very disappointed that everything went wrong”.
The German Grand Prix marked an impressive milestone for Daniel Ricciardo as he became only the third Australian driver to reach a century in Formula One.
He finished fourth, just 2.3 seconds behind Verstappen, but would have been in third place had he not been victim to a controversial five-second penalty for “forcing” the young Dutch driver off the track on a corner.
With the double podium, Red Bull has moved ahead of Ferrari into second in the constructors’ championship.
With Mercedes again annexing the front row, albeit by a smaller margin that it enjoyed in Friday practice, Verstappen and Red Bull team-mate Daniel Ricciardo look set to battle over the final podium spot, possibly with the third row Ferraris in the mix as well, but the youngster is hoping for a less contentious afternoon than he had in similar circumstances in Hungary a week ago.
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The incident on Sunday bore more than a striking resemblance to Rosberg’s dramatic last-lap crash with Hamilton at the Austrian Grand Prix earlier this month in which he was also penalised by the stewards.
