14/04/2019
NEWS STORY
Renault F1 Team's Daniel Ricciardo secured his first points in black and yellow in the Heineken Chinese Grand Prix at the Shanghai International Circuit; the landmark 1,000th race in Formula 1 history.
Daniel's seventh place finish, after starting the race in the same grid position, meant the Australian took home six points to open his 2019 account.
Nico Hulkenberg retired from the race on lap 16 shortly after his pit-stop, with the team investigating an MGU-K issue on his car.
Nico started from P8 on Pirelli's used Soft (red) tyres, pitting on lap 11 for new Hard (white) tyres, before retiring on lap 16. Daniel started from P7 on used Soft tyres, pitting on lap 18 for new Hard tyres.
Nico Hulkenberg: "It's clearly a very disappointing race for us today. It was a difficult start to the race, I lost a position and it was tough following cars ahead. We pitted and came out in some traffic, but then I felt a loss of power. We tried our best to fix it out there as it looked like a software issue, but it wasn't possible and we had to park up. We're looking into the issue, but it looks like an MGU-K related problem. We have things to work on ahead of the next race, but we will look at everything in detail and come back stronger."
Daniel Ricciardo: "It's good to get on the board, finish the race and have my first points with the team. We'll take the positives from that. It might have looked a simple seventh, but it wasn't easy. It was a bit of a lonely race, I didn't have so many battles but I was being pushed hard from the cars behind all the way to the end. It's a strong result and the best we can ask for; at least for today. We want to push on from this over the next couple of races and keep working from here."
Cyril Abiteboul, Team Principal: "We can be pleased that Daniel opened his points-scoring account with us this weekend. He drove an intelligent race to conserve the tyres on a one-stop strategy, which we had to adopt to maintain position despite the challenge of starting on the soft tyres. Nico, unfortunately, retired with an MGU-K related problem that we will investigate further after this weekend. We will look at the weekend as a whole and our focus switches to the next race."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Shanghai, here.