Ricciardo underestimated his power in F1

Sacked by McLaren after a difficult two-year stint in papaya, Ricciardo joined Red Bull Racing as third driver.

That saw him benched for the opening half of the 2023 season as he worked in support for Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez before getting the call-up to replace Nyck de Vries at AlphaTauri from the Hungarian Grand Prix.

Ricciardo’s appointment is part of the team’s decision to change direction and step out from under the shadow of Red Bull Racing.

The Italian team, now known as RB, started life as Minardi before becoming Toro Rosso in 2006, where it was used as something of a finishing school for rookie drivers such as Sebastian Vettel, Ricciardo, Max Verstappen, Carlos Sainz, and a host of others.

But lately the team has changed and is now looking to do more than simply exist to feed Milton Keynes with talent.

Ricciardo’s appointment speaks to that as, at 33 years old with eight grand prix wins from 232 starts (at the end of 2022), he was a veteran of the sport.

“I’ve been in F1 a long time, driven a lot of cars, seen a lot of things. My knowledge… I probably underestimated that,” Ricciardo told The Age of his return to the grid with AlphaTauri.

“The team was struggling a bit at the time, and I could see that my experience was helping.

“The way the team responded to what I had to say, the questions they asked… I grew to really enjoy that aspect of it.”

Ricciardo’s arrival coincided with an upturn in performance from the Faenza operation.

How much of that was a result of the Australian is impossible to say, but there is no question his presence had a positive impact.

His feedback and ability to process races from the cockpit were standout assets the team hadn’t realised it’d been missing.

He also reinvigorated the garage at a team that spent much of the year at the bottom of the constructors’ standings.

“You realise with age that you have the power to change how a garage feels, how a team responds,” Ricciardo said.

“There’s hundreds of people that work with these teams, but you’re one of the two people who the world watches to see how the team performs.

“We don’t just drive the car, we have the ability to alter the atmosphere in the room and that’s something I’m definitely more aware of.”

That attitude marks a change from Ricciardo, who once equated success in F1 directly to race results.

However, after taking a battering while at McLaren, the West Aussie spent his time away not only rediscovering his love for the sport but also a new perspective.

“From that mid-point of 2022 when I basically didn’t have a job and was unsure what I was going to do, I was almost wishing the races away, wanting the season to be done with,” he admitted

“Coming back last year, I found that I wasn’t thinking about anything else because I was truly happy doing what I was doing.

“I was in love with the sport again, with driving and competing.

“In 2022, I struggled with that and just wanted it to be over.”

That time away has also seen Ricciardo re-evaluate what he wants from the sport and how he approaches it.

“It’s had a long-lasting impact. I got my energy and excitement back by pushing a few things to the side, cutting out a lot of clutter,” he added.

“I wanted to be able to fall back in love with training again, but to train and to train well you need to get some time back in your life to do that properly.

“You can’t do a million other things because you have no window to train, and then maybe you’re not as strong or as healthy or as fresh as you should be, and it spirals.

“I want to get that feeling back again, to bring out the old me. Racing and training are my priorities right now, and all of the other stuff is secondary.”

Ricciardo will turn 35 in July, and acknowledges he’s closer to the end of his career than the start.

His ambition remains to find a way back into a Red Bull Racing drive, a tacit acknowledgement that his decision to leave the team in 2018 was the wrong call.

To do that he must demonstrate he’s capable of performing at the level he once did, and that starts with beating team-mate Yuki Tsunoda.

In the two races thus far in 2024 the score stands at 1-1 in their head-to-head, though in reality, it’s 2-0 in favour of the Japanese driver after he allowed Ricciardo through in Bahrain.

It’s been a tough start to the year, with the pressure to deliver the results Red Bull’s motorsport tsar Helmut Marko expects only increasing.

All the while, Liam Lawson is waiting in the wings, ready to be parachuted in should there be any sign of weakness from either Ricciardo or Tsunoda.

While Ricciardo believes he has rediscovered himself and his love of F1, the key to his future is now proving that on track.