AUSTIN, Texas — Christian Horner says it is “ironic” Red Bull’s Renault issues keep happening on Daniel Ricciardo’s side of the garage given his imminent move to the French company’s factory team.
Ricciardo punched a hole in the wall out of frustration from his early retirement in Austin, which was linked to a failure with the Energy Store component in his engine. Since winning the Monaco Grand Prix Ricciardo has failed to return to the podium and has had increasingly bad luck in recent races on the reliability side.
Horner thought Renault would be doing more to ensure Ricciardo was finishing races.
“You can’t blame him, the frustration that is in him,” Horner said. “What’s ironic is it’s always on his car. It was the other way round last year with Max but as Renault’s premier driver I think you wouldn’t expect these issues to be happening.
“From a team point of view, all we want to do is finish the year on a high with him and have a chance to celebrate the time that he has been with us. It’s just unfortunate that these things keep happening.” Ricciardo made the decision to move to Renault for the 2019 season during the summer break. Although reliability for the team’s factory cars has been fine, it is believed Renault has now slipped behind the most recent upgrade of Honda — the team set to supply Red Bull next year.
“There must be frustrations obviously within him, with the issues that are happening he’s knows it’s not the team issue, he knows it’s nothing that we’ve done and he can’t get his head around why it keeps happening to him. It was a throttle linkage in Japan, a battery here, it’s hugely frustrating for him.”