Daniel Ricciardo has recounted how a single qualifying simulation lap in the Red Bull Racing RB19 was enough to convince Helmut Marko and Christian Horner to give him another shot in F1.
Ricciardo stepped away from racing at the end of 2022 following two difficult seasons with McLaren.
Working as the third driver for Red Bull it was uncertain whether he would ever make a competitive return.
However, some time away from the sport and a handful of promising simulator sessions saw the 34-year-old rediscover his passion.
His efforts were enough to earn him a seat in the Red Bull RB19 for a tyre test at Silverstone in the days that followed the British Grand Prix.
“The simulator stuff was going well and I was, let’s say, heavily invested again,” Ricciardo explained on the Beyond the Grid podcast.
“My enthusiasm, I’m sure that gets passed along. So if Simon [Rennie, group leader of simulator engineering at Red Bull] said, I’m sure Christian is checking in as well, if he’s not checking in directly with me, he’s checking in with Simon, ‘How’s Daniel going? What do you think? What do you see? Is it the old Daniel?’, all of this.
“Then there was word of a Pirelli test. I think I might have even asked.
“I said, ‘Look, I would love to drive this car’ because, okay, yes, it’s a very fast car, but it’s also a car that I wanted to know if it was still familiar for me and it was still something that I could also just bring my confidence back.”
Given the opportunity, the reinvigorated Ricciardo set about making sure he was physically prepared to jump-start his F1 career after more than six months out of a car.
He was present at the British Grand Prix in the days prior which helped whet his appetite for the test outing that followed and on race day the Australian understood what was at play.
“I already started to mentally put myself in that position again because I knew if this test went well, things could change quickly,” he conceded.
“I was certainly a little bit nervous but ultimately, I was excited,” he added of the test itself.
“I think some of the nerves were because, by July, I was at a point where I had my confidence back and I believed I could do a great test.
“So it’s just like, it’s up to you now, this is in your hands. Honestly, your future could hang on this test. It was good to feel that pressure again.
“I think that was important as well. I wasn’t like pushing it back, I was embracing it again, and all these things that I used to really thrive off, kinda was getting it back.”
On his first run, Ricciardo spun twice. Once at The Loop and another at Luffield.
Both were low speed and due to his time out of the car. Crucially, neither dented his confidence and was brushed off in an instant.
“I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, man, what are you doing?’ I didn’t let it get in my head. I was just like, ‘Oh well, makes sense, haven’t driven in seven, eight, nine months’, whatever it was,” he reasoned.
“Even the way I brushed it off, I think it was really good for me because it didn’t faze me.”
From there, things went more smoothly. He banked laps and improved his times before being finally sent out for a pseudo-qualifying simulation.
“I did maybe, I don’t know, eight laps or something, maybe 10, came back in, so we put some new tyres on,” Ricciardo said.
“We put FP2 fuel in the car. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, the first timed lap I did was on the money. Right on the money.
“Like, you take the fuel out to put it to quali fuel, and it was, I don’t know, it was a few hundredths off Max [Verstappen]’s pole time.”
It was that moment for Ricciardo that arguably revived his F1 career, and calls were soon being made to place him at Scuderia AlphaTauri for the remainder of the season.
“Coming into that lap, I was so excited,” the eight-time race winner admitted.
“I treated it, obviously, like a qualifying lap. Mind you, like 15 minutes earlier I felt like my head was gonna fall off in Turn 1, so I was like, am I even going to be able to push on new tyres and do all this?
“But again, I just had that feeling in the car and that confidence.
“Of course, I was a little rusty to start but there were elements of the car that felt so familiar, that I knew then, okay, a new set of tyres, we’ll take a bit of fuel out of it… I kind of just knew what it could do and what it was capable of.
“I’m not going to say it was easy or effortless but I had a lot of confidence in it that it could do what I thought it could, and crossing the line, when I looked at the time, I was like, oh, I don’t know if I was excited to go that quick.
“I knew that day had the potential to be a really good day but I’d be lying if I said I was going to do that time, pretty much my first lap with new tyres.
“That was wild. It gave me a very big smile.”
Before the end of the day, Nyck de Vries had been given his marching orders and Ricciardo’s return was announced soon after.
He immediately made an impression, out-performing Yuki Tsunoda in Hungary, having never driven the Scuderia AlphaTauri AT04 before the weekend.
Languishing 10th in the constructors’ championship when he arrived, by year-end the team was eighth, aided by Ricciardo’s impressive seventh-place finish in Mexico City.
And all of it because of a single lap after a period of soul searching and rediscovery.
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