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Ricciardo: I love the fight, but Vettel move was illegal

Daniel Ricciardo stands by his criticism of Sebastian Vettel's driving after the Ferrari driver was penalised following the Mexican Grand Prix.

Vettel was promoted to third due to a penalty for Max Verstappen and stood on the podium on Sunday, but was later demoted to fifth after being given his own ten-second time penalty for moving under braking against Ricciardo. The Australian was clearly unhappy in his post-race television interviews and after being moved up to third place he said his opinion hadn't changed after reviewing the incident.

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"It’s always when you’re in the moment that sometimes what you think just happened maybe doesn’t always look like that from the outside, but I was quite convinced that I committed to the move and he closed me on braking," Ricciardo said.

"So we go to the media straight away and I spoke my mind because I thought that’s what happened, but when I got back here I still watched a replay because I wanted to make sure what I believed happened had happened.

"It was exactly as I thought it happened on the on-board, so with that … for starters, if you are going to move that late, you are already putting yourself in a bad position, if you know what I mean? When a driver moves under braking he is trying to repair a mistake he has made, which was not defending more before braking.

"So he left the door open, that allowed me to have a go and then it looked like he realised I was going to make the position so then he started to close and that was that. Obviously the rule is written since Austin and there has obviously been cases of it earlier, but now it’s on paper and that’s all happened."

Ricciardo added he enjoys battling hard for position but believes all the drivers are now aware of where the limit is.

"Don’t get me wrong, I love the fight, I love racing and I don’t like the penalties and all that, but this moving under braking, all of us drivers agreed that it’s not real racing and not correct."

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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.