‘Great shame’ for Tsunoda as he endures back to back DNFs and rues ‘unnecessary’ move from Stroll

Yuki Tsunoda retired from the Azerbaijan Grand Prix with damage sustained from contact with Lance Stroll, the second race in a row he’s failed to see the chequered flag following a collision with another car.

In Monza, Nico Hulkenberg was the guilty party as he sent one up the inside of Tsunoda, for which the stewards awarded the Haas driver a time penalty. But in Baku, it was Lance Stroll who tried to dive up the inside on the opening lap, catching Tsunoda’s engine cover and ripping a hole in the bodywork of the RB.

Although Tsunoda initially tried to continue, the damage was too great to drive around and he wound up retiring from the race.

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“Great shame,” he said afterwards. “Very frustrated to have this happen two races in a row. A very short race, losing the opportunity to score points, which would still have been tricky, but you never know on these street races.

“Starting P12 is obviously not ideal and means there are a lot of risks of getting damage. We just need to step up a little bit and qualify in the top 10, so we can get a better start.

“In terms of what happened on track, it felt like an unnecessary move from him [Stroll]. Sending it in like that, with a nothing-to-lose approach. I’m not sure what he had to gain, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him.”

The stewards didn’t opt to investigate the incident, something Tsunoda seemed unhappy with on his race radio when he was called into the pits to retire the car.

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Team mate Daniel Ricciardo also failed to score in Baku, coming home well outside the points in 13th after a tricky afternoon managing the Pirelli tyres. The Australian started on the hard compound in a bid to go long, which he certainly did – only pitting a couple of laps from the end for a set of softs.

But he struggled with graining throughout the race, and believes the team needs to dig deep to understand why that affected him more than the cars around him.

“It was a tough race. The start felt okay; the medium runners in front of me looked like they were struggling, and we were able to catch them. I was on the hard tyre and tried to use it where I could by going long and finding the pace,” he said afterwards.

“After a few laps, we picked up a lot of graining, which got worse and worse over 10 laps, causing us to be a few seconds off the pace. The team could see some other cars were clearing the graining, however it definitely took us a lot longer. When we did, we were able to come back and have a bit of pace again, but we had lost a lot of ground.

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“I’ve never experienced graining like that, the swing of lap time was up to four seconds. We need to understand why we had more graining for longer.”

Th good news for RB is that they have an immediate opportunity to put the difficult race behind them, with Singapore coming up at the weekend. And their main rivals in the constructors', Haas, only manged to score one point – reducing the gap between the two teams to five points with seven races remaining.