Ricciardo left with ‘a lot of anger’ as he rues RB strategy call that dropped him out of the points in Hungary

Daniel Ricciardo could not hide his frustration after an RB strategy call backfired in the Hungarian Grand Prix, resulting in the Australian dropping down the order and out of the points.

The race had looked to hold some promise for Ricciardo after qualifying, where he secured a grid slot of P9. However, after slipping backwards at the start come Sunday, the 35-year-old was then brought in for an early pit stop to swap from his medium tyres to new hards.

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This resulted in Ricciardo emerging back out into traffic – amid several cars that had pitted for softs – and from there he struggled to make much ground before ultimately crossing the line in P12.

When asked about the idea that pitting so early could potentially undo his race, Ricciardo responded: “You wondered right, I thought the same thing honestly as soon as I… you don’t want to pull into the pits – you get the call and you know this isn’t the thing to do.

“But you get the call late and there’s no time to question it, because then if you miss a lap, it’s even worse. But as soon as I pulled in, the cars on softs had pulled in, I was on a medium – [we should have thought] let’s go, let’s use our clear air we’ve got.

“And then we come out in traffic and it’s just a DRS train and for what, we are all then on the same tyre and that’s… That’s one of the worst ones I’ve had in 250-something races. That was a long old frustrating race where I had a lot of anger.”

With his F1 future still undecided, each race now is arguably especially important for Ricciardo. As such, he acknowledged that seeing his afternoon in Hungary unravel without having a say over it was frustrating.

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“That’s the thing, I felt we’d taken ourselves out of the race so early,” the eight-time race winner explained. “And then we are expected to fight a car that’s coming a second a lap quicker on newer tyres, and it’s… what do you want me to do?

“We just made it so difficult for ourselves when we had pace and we could have just stayed out, clear air, stayed calm and do what we’d done all weekend. We did a race today, but we didn’t do a race, if you know what I mean. We were just driving around.”

On the other side of the RB garage, Yuki Tsunoda cut a happier figure after scoring points in P9. Bouncing back from a crash in Saturday’s qualifying – as well as a poor start to the race – the Japanese driver managed his first stint on the medium tyres well enough to do a one-stop race.

“[I’m] very happy with my race and obviously big thanks to the team and the mechanics who repaired [the car] very precisely overnight – without that I wouldn’t be here, so big thanks to them,” Tsunoda commented after the race.

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“To be honest, we didn’t expect to do a one-stop, it wasn’t even in our conversation. But I think to be fair we did a really good job with tyre management and instructions from the engineers and everything, we communicate really well and those things in the end played very good.

“So I will just continue like this. The car is in a good shape, which is the most important thing, and the next race is Spa which is a completely different track, so we can’t expect anything more or less. We just maximise our pace as much as we can, as we always do.”