Ricciardo beats Rosberg to win Belgian Grand Prix

SPA, Belgium: Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo beat Nico Rosberg to win an incident-packed Belgian Grand Prix here on Sunday. Meanwhile, Rosberg extended his championship lead over Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton in acrimonious circumstances.

Finnish driver Valtteri Bottas was third

Speaking after the win, Daniel Ricciardo, said “You know everyone was saying we didn’t really have a chance around here, but I think we had some really good pace today and surprised ourselves. It feels a bit surreal, but another win is very cool, very cool. It was difficult staying out at the end of the race.”

“ When you’re the leader as well you always feel like you’re the most vulnerable when it comes to a pit stop or not, but Simon my engineer came on the radio and said I think it’s 11 laps left, can these tyres get to the end? And I said I think I can keep more or less this pace, and we were able to, and then on the last lap I found a couple more tenths, so I was having a bit of fun then! There’s been a lot of good things about the win today, obviously the last two came from a more aggressive style of race, but today was more calculated and it was nice to win under different circumstances,” he added.

Meanwhile Sebastian Vettel, who finished finish said, “Towards the end of the race was good, I was in a rush to get through because the laps were going down and obviously Alonso and Magnussen didn’t have fresh tyres, so Jenson and me caught them fairly quickly. In the end it was good not to lose a position compared to when we decided to pit, which was probably a little bit late, but in the end we maintained the position. The battle was fairly interesting, it was a bit all over the place with people pushing each other off on the track, but we race hard, although sometimes maybe a bit too hard! The team did a great job in the pit stops, three perfect stops, they felt really quick.”