Ricciardo 'screwed' by Red Bull pit stop blunder

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After being the fastest man on track on Thursday and Saturday, pole sitter Daniel Ricciardo was on course to win the 2016 Monaco Grand Prix - until his hopes were cruelly ripped away from him by a massive blunder at Red Bull during his final pit stop.

Ricciardo had been shadowing Lewis Hamilton and pitted for a set of supersofts on lap 33 - only to find that the team wasn't ready and that no tyres had been laid out.

"I was called into box, I didn’t make the call, I got called. They should have been ready," he said, rejecting suggestions that he had made the call himself and caught the pit crew out.

"I don’t want to even comment on the race to be honest," he said. "Two weekends in a row now I’ve been screwed, It sucks.

"It hurts, I don’t have anything else to say to be honest.

Ricciardo spend the second half of the race on Hamilton's tail, but try as he might he couldn't find a way around the Mercedes on the notoriously tight and twisty Monaco circuit. Finally he had to surrender and settle for second place, but it still hurt.

"I thought I was the quickest in all conditions but second place doesn’t show much for it.

"I think we had the speed in the wet, on the start we pulled away. Could have fit inters and we put ourselves in a race with Lewis we didn’t need to be in, and then the pit stop was the pit stop."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.