Red Bull team principal Christian Horner hopes the "dark cloud" that's following his driver Daniel Ricciardo around has gone for his last two races with the team before he leaves to drive for Renault.
Ricciardo qualified on pole for Sunday's race in Mexico, but the Aussie could only manage 61 laps before yet another reliability issue forced him to retire for the eighth time this season.
The Red Bull driver said immediately after the race that he felt "helpless" and that he was "done" with the RB14 for this season, but his boss believes he was speaking in the heat of the moment.
"He's just had an immensely frustrating afternoon. You can understand his emotions are running incredibly high," Horner told Crash. "It's gutting not just for him but for the whole team because we were looking at potentially a one-two finish which has enormous value to us.
"It's a bittersweet victory in that it is fantastic for Max (Verstappen, race winner) to have driven an outstanding race - absolutely outstanding race, but I'm pretty confident that Daniel would have been able to hold off Sebastian (Vettel) over those remaining laps.
"You can understand his frustration, and hope that this dark cloud that is following him around lifts for the final two races."
Horner was asked to whether he had spoken to the clearly angry Ricciardo yet: "He wanted to get out of the circuit pretty as you can imagine, so we'll speak a bit later when things have calmed down."
Ricciardo is set to make his final appearance for Red Bull at the end of November in the season's concluding race in Abu Dhabi.
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