Both Ricciardo and Vettel were ultimately beat to the finish by two-stopping team-mates Max Verstappen and Kimi Raikkonen, leading to Verstappen’s fairytale victory on debut for RBR.

However, Horner says the reason why Ricciardo, who led the opening stages of the race after the two Mercedes drivers collided, was put on the three-stop strategy is because the team genuinely believed it was the best way to beat Ferrari to victory.

“We felt that once Sebastian had passed Carlos Sainz and was running in clean air, you could see that his pace was strong, stronger than ours and the obvious way that they were going to navigate themselves past us was through a three stop,” explained Horner.

“So we had to take a tactical decision at that point to say do we try and cover Vettel with one of our cars, therefore the best car which we believed had the best chance of winning the race, which was the lead car, and we elected to go for the three stop.

“It looks like Ferrari made that same choice at that point in time. Ferrari then went very, very early on their last stint to try and get Sebastian track position and obviously we pitted I think five or six laps later with Daniel which gave him a much a better tyre.”

Vettel hold up costly

Had Ricciardo cleared Vettel early in his final stint, Horner believes he could have hunted down Verstappen and Raikkonen. But his failure to get by meant the strategy fell short, and the gamble on two stops paid off big time.

“Sebastian didn’t seem to be able to catch the leading cars as quickly as we thought and he seemed to be in trouble in that last stint, so I think had Daniel managed to get past Sebastian a little earlier, he obviously had a big pace advantage on the two leading cars,” he said.

“So it’s one of those things. It’s very easy to sit here with hindsight but at that point in the race it was far from obvious which was the quicker route to go and we felt, Vettel as the biggest opponent, we would take him on with Ricciardo.”

Ricciardo said earlier that he felt like the result was a lost opportunity for a fourth GP victory.

Additional reporting by Jonathan Noble