Daniel Ricciardo offers Valtteri Bottas apology after triggering first corner "chaos"

Bottas spins during the Mexican Grand Prix — Photo: © LAT Images

Mexico City Grand Prix

Ricciardo offers Bottas apology after triggering first corner "chaos"

Ricciardo turned Bottas around to take the chance of points away

Ewan Gale

Monday 8 November 2021 00:10

Daniel Ricciardo has offered an apology to Valtteri Bottas for the first corner contact that ruined both driver's races at the Mexico City Grand Prix.

In the usual stampede towards turn one at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez Bottas was side by side with team-mate Lewis Hamilton and eventual winner Max Verstappen.

The Finn bailed out of the three-wide battle in order to try and set up an aggressive exit through turns two and three but was collected by Ricciardo after the Australian locked up on the dusty inside line.

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"I apologise to him without really seeing it but I was the one who went into him so I will say sorry for now and see if there was much I could have done or if it was simply a turn one incident and a bottleneck kind of thing," said Ricciardo.

Explaining the charge to the first corner, the Italian Grand Prix winner added: "There was definitely a lot going on.

"I still haven't seen a full replay. The first few hundred metres down to turn one... to be honest, it is always fun here. There are so many slipstreams and it is dusty and it is kind of chaos but there is some form of fun in the chaos.

"Under braking, I remember I think there was room on the inside with Perez so there was a gap and then it is one of those ones where if you don't go for a gap, someone will and you can easily just get swallowed up.

"At that time I think it was a reasonable bit of space to go for and it did, from memory feel fairly under control in the first part of braking.

"As we got closer to the apex, obviously everyone starts to close in. At the last moment you try to slow the car up and I locked a little bit and at that moment Valtteri started to come across so a combination of that and obviously hit."