Red Bull baffled by struggles with softer tyres

Daniel Ricciardo started from second on the grid, but quickly dropped down the order as he struggled for grip with the supersoft tyres.

Both him and teammate Max Verstappen pitted very early to switch to softs, but the problems continued and they ended up switching to medium tyres, which they had not ran all weekend.

Ricciardo went on to finish a distant seventh, just ahead of Verstappen.

The Australian conceded Red Bull was at a loss to explain its problems. 

"We went back quite quickly. We just had rear tyre issues, couldn't keep the grip in them, couldn't keep the temperature out of them," said Ricciardo.

"It felt like they were getting really hot, wheel-spinning in fourth gear.

"It's a bit unexpected, we race at some hot circuits across the calendar. Singapore, for example, is always one of our stronger ones. So we didn't expect to suffer with that today, but that was our biggest limitation.

"We need to understand why. I think then, the two-stop wasn't the plan but we were forced to do it. There was nothing in strategy, we couldn't have done anything better with what we had. That was just the pace today."

Team boss Christian Horner agreed that the team needed to find answers, especially as it had previously struggled with the tyres because the track was too cold, unlike today.

"It's a difficult one to understand. On the supersoft and the soft we had very high degradation. We just couldn't do the laptimes.

"So then we went on to the hardest compound, and the car came alive on that compound. Max has set the third fastest time of the race, so a little bit of homework to do to understand what's happened there.

"Last week it was too cold, this week too hot. There's something that we've missed in the last two grands prix that we've got to get on top of.

"We've qualified well here, and the first two laps Daniel had no problem going with Nico... and then suddenly, bang, the tyres have started going off. It looks more accentuated on our car than any other."

Additional reporting by Andrew van Leeuwen.