Ricciardo: Race was sometimes busy, sometimes boring

Daniel Ricciardosays that although he was busy at times, he found the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi “boring”.

TheRenaultdriver finished in P11, just outside the points, after battling the McLarens and his team-mateNico Hulkenbergfor most of the race, passing the latter on the final lap.

“Sometimes I was busy and then I was – another b-word – bored,” he said after the race.

“We know that sometimes the F1 races are like this. At the beginning, we were looking alright on the softs but were in a McLaren train and couldn’t really do anything.

“Then the hard is what actually hurt our race the most. For whatever reason, that tyre just didn’t get going on our car. I felt already leaving the pits that it just had no front grip.

“I didn’t want to complain on the radio straight away, but soon enough I realised it wasn’t going to get better so I told the team, and they could see it too, and eventually we two-stopped, put a soft on and found a ton of pace. So we had the pace today, just the wrong tyre in that middle stint.”

It’s been a largely disappointing season for Ricciardo and his team – the Aussie knew when he left Red Bull to join Renault that 2019 wouldn’t be easy, but he wouldn’t have expected to have been comfortably beaten by customer team McLaren.

Still, the Aussie is trying to take positives from it.

“It’s important for the team to keep the spirits high,” he added.

“We did under-achieve this year but there’s still a lot of things learnt, and a lot of positives, and we did have some highs, so we’ll take some motivation into the winter.”

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