His team-mate Daniil Kvyat had no such problems as he found plenty of pace on the soft tyres, the young Russian edging his team-mate to finish second fastest behind Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton.
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The accident came only three days after most of the drivers had attended the funeral of Frenchman Jules Bianchi, who died last week in hospital of injuries sustained at the Japanese Grand Prix nine months ago.
“But I can not tell you how hot it is out there”. It is like driving in a sauna with this racing suit on, and the thermal underwear, and so hot! This is a challenging circuit and that is how it should be, but it would be good if it is not so hot on Sunday for the race.
Earlier, Ricciardo had been about half a second slower than Hamilton, who appeared very comfortable on a track where he’s won four times before.
The 30-year-old Briton leads his Mercedes teammate Nico Rosberg by 17 points in the title race.
“Friday’s are usually masked by fuel loads, engine modes and so on, so it would be hard to get a truly clear picture, but our expectation coming into the weekend was this would be a circuit that would hopefully present an opportunity for us, and both drivers have been pretty happy with the auto on short and long runs”. “That?s good – the more the merrier!” Practice was paused for a while as marshals examined his auto.
Ricciardo escaped punishment for his FP2 engine blow as he was using a “practice engine” and not a race engine.
“It was really close and I thought the lap was good enough, I was expecting my engineer to say I’d got top-three”.
Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen finished in fifth, while team mate Sebastian Vettel recovered from two spins to earn seventh, behind Toro Rosso’s Carlos Sainz. Fernando Alonso’s McLaren-Honda was eighth ahead of Williams pair Valtteri Bottas and Felipe Massa.
The day had started with a dramatic morning session that, in addition to Raikkonen?s incident, saw Mexican Sergio Perez of Force India survive unhurt and walk away from a spectacular crash.
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Daniel Ricciardo’s miserable luck with engines in 2015 continued during second practice at the Hungarian Grand Prix as he was forced to retire from the 90-minute session.
