McLaren reveals the reason for Ricciardo São Paulo’s resignation

McLaren F1 team boss Andreas Seidl has stated that a crack in the “drive unit insulation” was behind Daniel Ricciardo’s retirement at the São Paulo Grand Prix on Sunday.

Ricciardo was driving to eighth with a bold one-stop strategy when instructed to return to the pits and give up his car.

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When asked about the reasons for the call, Seidl explained: “We had a power outage on the route.

“We did an initial investigation and found a technical problem, a crack in the chassis side of the aggregate insulation that we now need to investigate further and I can give another update in Qatar.”

After Seidl had only scored a single point on the last two weekends, Seidl joked in his congratulations for the upcoming Qatar GP: “It couldn’t be worse!”

Ricciardo hopes PU is “recoverable”

The retirement was Ricciardo’s third result without points in the last four races, ending the longest active target series in F1 with 34 races, which goes back to last year’s season opening Grand Prix of Austria.

Ricciardo reflected on the failure: “I felt it come a few laps earlier, and then Tom [Stallard] Let me know he saw it too, so I asked if there was anything we could do to help.

“We made a couple of switch changes, but it kept getting smaller and smaller.

“We couldn’t fix it on the track so hopefully it’s recoverable but it was game over.”

After enjoying the majority of the season so far over a strong reliability, Ricciardo added: “Of course things like this can happen.

“We looked like we were going to take some points so the race went pretty well. We did pretty well and maybe a one-stop could have worked pretty well for us.

“It was definitely a better day than Saturday. I was pretty happy with the way we went. It was just out of our control.”