Shortly after, a race engineer tried to reassure Ricciardo, saying “get your head together, you’re quicker than him, let’s do it”, but the error was a bad one.
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“But I didn’t know until he just told me here [during Rosberg’s briefing] so I said “thanks for being a gentleman”.
“But I felt I earned it and the next one is a good race for me generally”.
But Hamilton, who started third, excelled in the wet conditions albeit he was given a huge boost when the charging Daniel Ricciardo was bushwhacked by his own team when they unforgivably failed to get his new tyres ready for his his second pit stop.
“But I feel really bad for Nico, too; he endured a messy race in a auto that didn’t have the pace today, a delayed second pit stop that cost him track position and then found himself stuck behind Alonso for the rest of the race”.
Horner said he wants to owe an apology to the Australian driver on behalf of the entire team, Sport24 reported.
“It was quite straightforward from the team, give the other guy a chance to win the race”.
Red Bull motorsport chief Helmut Marko apologised to Daniel Ricciardo and said his team had gifted victory to Lewis Hamilton with a bungled pit stop in Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix.
After the track dried out, Hamilton came in for quicker ultra-soft tires on lap 32, with Ricciardo coming in a lap later to switch to the same tires.
“I knew it would be virtually impossible to win here unless something radical happens”, Hamilton added. As a result of that, I got traffic so I had to hold – and lost even more time and places as cars just went by.
“One lap later, he hadn’t managed to find that extra pace, so we asked him to move aside – which he did immediately”.
It was only the second time in eight years that the Mercedes AMG driver has won in Monaco, a place he also happens to call home, but it nearly didn’t come to be.
Ricciardo came in for supersoft tyres on the following lap but his hopes of getting out ahead of the Briton were dashed when Red Bull were not ready for the change. “And then the pit stop was the pit stop”, he said.
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“I prayed for a day like this so I feel truly blessed”, said Hamilton, who had cut a disconsolate figure after a fuel pressure problem in qualifying left him third on the starting grid. “But a swing goes both ways, and I’m conscious of that”.
