Ricciardo annoyed with team's 'stupid error'

Daniel Ricciardo was left frustrated and annoyed after what he felt was a botched opportunity by his team to achieve a better result than P5 in qualifying.

The Aussie was hoping to deliver on his expectations of fighting for a spot in the first two rows of the Monaco Grand Prix grid.

In the end however, he missed out on that prospect by half a second, beaten to P4 by team mate Max Verstappen but blaming his team for putting him in traffic on his final Q1 run.

"In Q3 we committed just to doing one lap," he explained.

"In Q1 and Q2 it seemed like the rear tyres were going off doing that extra lap, and some others looked like they were starting to do it.

"To go with strategy, we knew we needed to go hard on the outlaps, to get a clear lap out of the pits to warm the tyres up. In the last run I came out with traffic.

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"It seemed like I had such a clear track behind, I don’t know why we didn’t wait to put me out in clear air – unless the timer was going down and we weren’t going to make it, which I don’t think was the case – it just seemed like we made a stupid, silly error.

"Maybe I’m missing something, but it seemed an obvious and basic mistake."

Asked about his outlook for tomorrow, a disappointed Ricciardo felt that his race had perhaps already been sealed.

"The race is today, to be honest. Qualifying is pretty much everything around here.

"We’re better than fifth, from practice I didn’t even go a second quicker, we underachieved so much. And this is the last place you want to do that.

"Frustrating today, not happy at all."

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