Yuki Tsunoda's race was over before it started

This wasn't a battle. This was one driver having a race and one driver never getting the chance to start.

Tsunoda's opening stint averaged 88 seconds per lap — two full seconds slower than Ricciardo's medium tyre pace — but that number is poisoned. His fastest lap on Lap 5? Deleted. Track limits at Turn 2. His lap on Lap 7, right before pitting? Also deleted. Same corner. By the time he boxed for fresh tyres, he'd completed seven laps and had two of them thrown out. Then the car stopped on Lap 8.

Here's what the data actually tells you: Tsunoda was struggling from Lap 1. His hard tyre showed positive degradation — the only stint in this entire analysis where the tyres got slower lap after lap. That's not a setup issue. That's a driver fighting the car, running wide, losing time, and getting penalised for it.

Ricciardo, meanwhile, had his own catastrophic afternoon — a five-second penalty for forcing a car off track, a botched penalty service that earned him another ten seconds, and a final finish of P13. But he finished. He completed 53 laps. His medium-to-hard strategy worked exactly as planned: consistent 85-second laps on the hard compound with near-zero degradation. Was it impressive? No. Was it a race? Yes.

The comparison everyone will make is position: P13 versus P20. But P20 doesn't mean last place when you retire on Lap 8. It means classified last because you were lapped multiple times by drivers who kept going. Tsunoda wasn't beaten. He was eliminated.

The real story isn't Ricciardo's comeback from penalties — it's that Tsunoda never got to mount one. Two track limits violations in seven laps isn't bad luck. It's a driver over-driving, searching for grip that wasn't there, and paying for it twice at the same corner. Then the mechanical failure just closed the file.

So when you see the headlines about Ricciardo's "difficult day" and Tsunoda's "retirement," remember this: one driver had a difficult day and salvaged points. The other had two laps deleted and seven laps completed before the car gave up.

At Baku, watch whether Tsunoda can keep the car between the white lines when the setup doesn't suit him. Because at Monza, he couldn't. And by the time the data could tell us why, he was already back in the garage.