Ricciardo: Sprint result served to silence critics

MIAMI — Daniel Ricciardo said his sprint race was a “middle finger” statement performance aimed at his recent critics.

Ricciardo finished fourth, behind Red Bull’s Sergio Perez and ahead of Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz, who gave the Australian a thumbs up from the cockpit after the chequered flag.

The result gave Ricciardo, who was under fire for a sluggish start to the year, his first points of the season.

When asked if it felt like an important result, Ricciardo said: “Yeah, it was, I mean, it’s so nice to fight at the front of course but then to be just holding for what we know are faster cars, it feels like a statement.

“It’s nice, it’s nice to still have that dog in me, it’s cool. Lot of people like to talk s— so it’s nice to couple of middle fingers up, subtly.”

Ricciardo’s Saturday summed up the topsy turvy nature of F1, as he then was eliminated in Q1 during qualifying for Sunday’s race. The RB driver was still focusing on the positives from the sprint several hours later.

“That’s the thing, like, first few races everything kind of could have gone wrong did go wrong so we had a little bit of a sniff yesterday let’s say and I feel like we capitalised on that, so this morning as well, the start was good, everything was going well, and I just felt like it was time to capitalise, and yeah, make some noise,” Ricciardo said after grand prix qualifying.

“Here we are four hours later starting last for tomorrow! Honestly the weekend has still been good, this afternoon we’ll look into it, it’ll probably dictate the rest of our weekend but I don’t think it’s a reflection of our weekend, it’s still been really positive, would love to be out there in Q3 with Yuki but we’ll try and understand it for tomorrow.”

Ricciardo was at a loss to explain the massive contrast in performances.

“Obviously that’s frustrating, but it’s not like we changed the car and changed something different and were like ‘damn we shouldn’t have done that’. The first set was fine, there was, as always, some time to find and I felt like it was definitely quite easy to find on that second set even with a new set of tyres and track evo and a bit less fuel.

“The lap time’s there in the car, I simply just don’t really know what happened with that second set of tyres. It’s kind of a s— thing to say because there are no facts behind it, but you feel it when it doesn’t give you what you want, so that’s where the frustration lies.”

A three-place grid penalty from the Chinese Grand Prix two weeks ago means Ricciardo will start Sunday’s race in Miami at the back of the field.