Both collisions that eliminated our drivers from the race in China were unnecessary, says Mekies – F1sport.cz

The boss of the RB team Laurent Mekies claims that due to accidents that were not his fault, the drivers of the team led by him lost the chance to score points.

This year’s Chinese Grand Prix ended very unhappily for the Italian RB team. In the space of a few tens of seconds, the drivers of the Faenza stable were eliminated from the race due to collisions.

Daniel Ricciardo was the first to run into trouble after an inattentive Lance Stroll rear-ended him on lap 26 just before the race restart, while Júki Cunoda’s hopes ended immediately after he innocently collided with Kevin Magnussen on lap 27.

Both Ricciardo and Cunoda’s cars were damaged to the extent that they could not continue in the race. Even the fact that both Stroll and Magnussen received ten-second penalties could not ease the frustration of the RB team.

According to the head of RB Laurent Mekies, because of these incidents, the team led by him lost the chances of a good result, especially in the case of the Australian.

“Both situations seemed pointless…Both of our cars were taken out by rivals in the same lap, so of course it was a big missed opportunity. We felt we were fighting for the last point with our usual opponents. It was a nice and close fight,” assessed Mekies, quoted by Autosport.

“Immediately before the safety car came out, Daniel was attacking Lewis (Hamilton, editor’s note), so you could see that we had a good pace. We believe that Daniel could have fought with Nic (Hülkenberg) for the tenth position. But it is the way it is. That’s just racing,” said the French conciliatoryly.

“But the reassuring thing is that we had the pace again and that we were fighting for a point, even though we didn’t do very well on Friday. It was also nice to see Daniel performing at such a level and making good steps forward,” concluded Mekies.