Red Bull has decided against boosting Daniel Ricciardo’s slim championship hopes by making departing Sebastian Vettel the team ‘number 2’.<\/p>\n
After a difficult weekend in Russia, Australian Ricciardo is now a distant 92 points behind championship leader Lewis Hamilton — with only 100 more on offer over the final three grands prix of 2014.<\/p>\n
“Daniel would have to win all three,” Red Bull chief Christian Horner is quoted by Auto Motor und Sport, “and the Mercedes drivers not finish.<\/p>\n
“I think it’s just between Lewis and Nico now,” he was quoted as saying elsewhere.<\/p>\n
When running behind the seemingly Ferrari-bound Vettel on Sunday, Ricciardo pleaded over the radio early in the race that he could be driving quicker than his teammate.<\/p>\n
It was the obvious request for a team order.<\/p>\n
“Looking at the championship standings,” Horner explained afterwards, “team orders at this point don’t make much sense.”<\/p>\n
Red Bull’s decision to part on the best possible terms with Vettel might be an order right from the top, with team owner Dietrich Mateschitz having groomed the four-time world champion from boyhood.<\/p>\n
Billionaire Mateschitz told Salzburger Nachrichten newspaper on Sunday: “Vettel is now excluded from all developments that we are doing for next year’s car.<\/p>\n
“But that doesn’t mean that we are going to give him inferior material to Ricciardo.\u00a0 He will be treated identically in all of the remaining races,” he insisted.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Red Bull has decided against boosting Daniel Ricciardo’s slim championship hopes by making departing Sebastian Vettel the team ‘number 2’. After a difficult weekend in Russia, Australian Ricciardo is now a distant 92 points behind championship leader Lewis Hamilton — with only 100 more on offer over the final three grands prix of 2014. “Daniel …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24897,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[128,1096,262,5262,5340,129,164],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25333"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25333"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25334,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25333\/revisions\/25334"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}