Red Bull decide against team orders but Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen made to apologise to team after crash
Pair have been judged to have taken each other out of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix and will be made to apologise to the 800 Red Bull staff members at their Milton Keynes base
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Your support makes all the difference.Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen have been summoned to Red Bull’s Milton Keynes base to apologise for their race-ending collision in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix on Sunday, but team officials have decided against implementing team orders for the rest of the season as long as they keep it clean from now on.
What looked to be a certain points finish – and potential podium opportunity – quickly unravelled when Verstappen and Ricciardo started to fight between themselves after their one and only round of pit stops. Having spent the first half of the race trying to re-pass Verstappen after an early overtake, Ricciardo finally managed to do so only to emerge from the pits behind his 20-year-old teammate, with the pair all over the gearbox of third-placed Lewis Hamilton.
But rather than work together to user the Mercedes driver – who went on to triumph in a chaotic finish – the Red Bulls resumed their squabble and allowed the reigning world champion precious breathing space. The intra-team fight came to a head when Ricciardo smashed into the back of Verstappen’s car at near 200mph after the Dutchman appeared to move twice in defender under braking, resulting in them both spinning off at Turn One with race-ending damage.
A furious Christian Horner, the Red Bull Racing team principal, refused to comment immediately after the crash while Dr Helmut Marko, the team’s consultant and head of driver development, said that they will implement measures to ensure it does not happen again.
“I don’t care who is to blame,” Marko said immediately on Sunday when the two stricken Red Bull cars were left in a pile of used parts. “Both drivers should have enough brain to avoid such an accident. We will take measures to guarantee it won’t happen again.”
But a more reserved Horner – once the team had held a full debrief – admitted that they will not impose team orders on Ricciardo and Verstappen so long as they do not repeat their Azerbaijan antics, and said that both drivers will be made to apologise to the 800 Red Bull staff members ahead of the Spanish Grand Prix next weekend to ensure they know that they are “in the doghouse”.
“They’re equally responsible,” said Horner. “What’s obviously annoying is that we’ve given away an awfully large amount of points today, so both drivers will be apologising to all the members of staff who work so hard to put these cars together.
“It’s a fine line – competition is what people want to see, and we want to allow the drivers to race each other. For the last two years, they’ve done a very good job of that.
“We will discuss things prior to Barcelona, but we want to continue to allow the drivers to race. But they have to ensure that, if they are going wheel-to-wheel, they allow each other enough space.”
Red Bull have faced a dilemma over team orders in the past. In 2010, the failure to instruct their drivers – then Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber – led to a similar high-speed accident in the Turkish Grand Prix, while their relationship as teammates completely fell apart in 2013 when, having been told to stay behind Webber during the Malaysian Grand Prix, Vettel attacked and passed his teammate in the infamous ‘Multi 21’ incident.
Despite Horner blaming both drivers, Mercedes non-executive director and three-time world champion Niki Lauda laid the majority of the blame at the hands of Verstappen.
“It is 70 per cent Verstappen, and 30 per cent Ricciardo,” said Lauda. “If you move on him all the time, where can the poor guy go? It is a simple thing. If I were the Red Bull team, I would go home and cry. It is a disaster.”
Lauda also has experience of dealing with such controversies, with the memorable duel between Hamilton and 2016 world champion Nico Rosberg reaching a climax when they took each other out in the Spanish Grand Prix during the latter’s title-winning season. On that occasion, the two furious drivers – whose friendship had deteriorated into a bitter rivalry – were made to go through the first-lap crash with senior members of the team immediately afterwards, with exactly what happened in the debrief still a relative unknown.
But Lauda offered an insight into that meeting as he drew on his own experiences to suggest that Red Bull could financially punish Ricciardo and Verstappen, given that Mercedes considered doing just that to their drivers.
“I would bring them in the office and tell them how much less they will get paid for the damage they have done,” Lauda added. “We thought about this once [with Hamilton and Nico Rosberg] but we didn’t have to do it.”
Both drivers were reprimanded by the race stewards after the Grand Prix, and refused to blame each other as they accepted that they had let the team down. However, both stressed that they wanted to keep racing each other, which has duly been taken on board by the team.
“I don’t think we need to speak about whose fault because at the end of the day we are racing for a team,” Verstappen told Sky Sports. “We are representing a lot of people and when this happens it is just not good for both of us.
“This has happened before and you learn from it. We have to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s not only down to us, we speak to the team as well what we will do in the future. I don’t think letting us not race anymore is the way forwards but we will talk about it.
“Daniel and I are OK with each other. As racing drivers you go through every inch and of course you are not happy when you collide to each other as team-mates, but we are very fair to each other so we spoke immediately after the race.”
Ricciardo added: “It’s not a nice situation. We both feel pretty bad that it ended like that and for the team it’s pretty crappy.
“I’m pretty down. We’re thankful that we are allowed to race. Max and I love to race as we show.
“We did get close a few times in the race already touching. Sometimes we were on the limit and unfortunately it’s ended how it did. The incident itself, it’s a tough one. I thought the gap was opening up on the inside and once I was there I had to commit to that. I’m heartbroken for how everyone is feeling in the team right now.
“We’re not into each other right now, it’s more just about saying sorry to the team and just apologise the best way we can. We don’t want to be in that sort of situation.”
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