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F1 European GP: Ricciardo plays down Verstappen team order snub

Daniel Ricciardo has shrugged off the suggestion of friction between himself and team-mate Max Verstappen after the youngster didn't heed to a team order during the Canadian Grand Prix.

Ricciardo was coming up behind his fast-starting Red Bull Racing team-mate in the Montreal race towards the end of the first stint, prompting the team to inform Verstappen not to 'hold up' the Australian.

However, with Verstappen holding station in the immediate aftermath of the message, the deployment of the Virtual Safety Car would count against Ricciardo as he struggled to bring his tyres back up to temperature afterwards, allowing his counterpart to escape again.

Even so, while Ricciardo - who went on to finish seventh - admits this is because he likely lost grip as a result of getting close to Verstappen, he understands why his team-mate didn't swap positions after the Virtual Safety Car.

"We spoke and I was speaking on the radio, I wasn't getting upset or anything, I was just saying look in clean air I can be quicker and obviously you are basically telling the team that I think I am quicker than the car in front, so then a few laps later I said you know Max has also understood the message that he's probably holding you up a bit.

"I think the plan was to swap cars or at least for him to make life easy if I got close to him and then the virtual safety car came out and that sort of didn't really get things going. On the restart actually I wasn't actually as quick. I would say that probably when I got close to Max the front tyres suffered a bit and then on the restart they were quite slow at warming up, it took me a bit of time to get them up again.

"Let's say the opportunity was lost. A few things in the race didn't quite work my way but that's how it is, it's like that. I think this weekend we will just put it all together."

Zdroj: crash.net