Daniel Ricciardo’s single-sentence contribution to AlphaTauri’s press release announcing him as its new driver has his name attributed to it, but it may as well be attributed to the entire nation.
“I’m stoked to be back on track with the Red Bull family!”
You’ll struggle to find an Australian who disagrees.
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F1 BOMBSHELL AS DANIEL RICCIARDO BACK ON THE GRID IMMEDIATELY AS RIVAL AXED AFTER 10 RACES
Ricciardo’s time in the F1 wilderness was brief, and so too was his ascension back onto the grid.
In the space of around 48 hours he went from a third driver with an uncertain path back to the top to a participation run in a Pirelli tyre test to a full-blown full-time return with AlphaTauri, the team where he first established himself in Formula 1.
But the wheels had been in motion long before this week. At a minimum the Dutch media started reporting Nyck de Vries’s axing before Ricciardo had even turned a wheel in that highly billed test.
De Vries’s struggles to get to grips with life as a Formula 1 driver at AlphaTauri have been part of the equation. The bar was set high for the Formula 2 and Formula E champion, but continued failure to clear that benchmark has seen him rapidly fall out of favour with the team.
Simultaneously Ricciardo has been proving in the simulator that he can undo the damage done to his driving style by his stint at McLaren. Red Bull Racing principal Christian Horner has made several references to him having got his old race-winning mojo back.
It’s extremely rare for any team to have a driver of Ricciardo’s calibre on its books as a reserve. The combination of De Vries’s struggles and Ricciardo’s rehabilitation became irresistible, and the call was made to make a change.
Daniel Ricciardo is back on the grid.
WHAT WENT WRONG FOR NYCK DE VRIES?
The most unexpected part of this driver switch is the timing, with Nyck de Vries punted from the grid not just after only 10 races but without even having reached the mid-season break.
It’s a rough deal for the decorated Dutchman, particularly considering the car he’s been dealt for his debut season.
The 2023 AlphaTauri is so bad that team principal Franz Tost himself slammed his own engineers at the start of the year for being untrustworthy.
“The engineers tell me that we make some good progress, but I don’t trust them anymore,” he said.
“During the winter months they told me, ‘The car is fantastic, we’re making big progress’ and then we come to Bahrain and we are nowhere.
“[We don’t have] enough downforce, therefore the car is unstable under braking, overheating the rear tyres, washing out at the apex, bad traction — everything what you need to do a good lap time.”
On the latest episode of Pit Talk: McLaren gets achingly close to a double podium at the team‘s home race in Silverstone, but Aussie rookie Oscar Piastri’s fourth place is a big tick of approval in just his 10th grand prix. How high can McLaren get in the remainder of the season?
It’s in that difficult context that De Vries has been judged.
But he’s also had a higher bar to reach that your average rookie.
The 28-year-old is a multiple junior champion, a Formula E world champion and a winner in sportcars, including in the World Endurance Championship LMP2 class.
He also arrived off the back of his superb points finish at last year’s Italian Grand Prix covering for a sick Alex Albon. True, the car was worthy of points that day, but he also got the call on Saturday, having been testing for Aston Martin the day before.
But that bar became a rod for his own back.
He’s been trounced by teammate Yuki Tsunoda in eight of 10 comparable qualifying sessions and beaten in eight of 10 races in which both have seen the flag, including sprints.
His qualifying deficit is a not terrible 0.252 seconds on average, but that excludes his scrappy one-lap performances in Azerbaijan that left him without a representative time. It also includes him getting the better of Tsunoda in Spain, where the Japanese driver would have been comfortably ahead but for a track limits infringement.
More concerning is that an analysis of his qualifying gap shows no meaningful improvement in pace relative to his teammate, with the trend line showing a paltry 0.01-second gain per weekend.
While Tsunoda has been well regarded for his step up this season, he isn’t considered so strong a driver that these performances could be excused.
Now the axe has swung.
Piastri seals best ever finish in F1 | 02:00
DIDN’T DANIEL SAY HE WANTED A YEAR OFF?
Ricciardo said several times that he was targeting a 2024 return, once he’d had a chance to fully unwind from his difficult McLaren stint and rediscover the love for the sport that he said was at risk of evaporating with another bad year on the grid.
But that position started shifting relatively quickly.
In April at the Australian Grand Prix he admitted he was already leaning towards making a return after spending the off-season decompressing.
Perhaps the rumours of his possible elevation to De Vries’s seat in May — batted away by the team and both drivers — planted the seed, but in the last month he’s sounded increasingly open to an early comeback.
“I’ve had enough of a break now where I’ve got ants in my pants, in a positive way,” he told SpeedCity Broadcasting on Sunday. “I’m letting it all happen as it comes.”
And there’s one particularly good reason he’d change his mind.
His name is Liam Lawson.
The 21-year-old New Zealander is doing impressive things in Japan’s tough Super Formula series, where he’s currently second in the championship, and has won races in every year of his racing career, including in Formula 3, Formula 2 and the DTM.
Super Formula is the same path Red Bull put Pierre Gasly on before his Formula 1 debut.
Lawson is the most senior driver in the program. He’s next in line for AlphaTauri.
If Ricciardo had turned down a mid-year AlphaTauri offer and Lawson was promoted in his place, it probably would have closed the door to him in 2024, which would have almost certainly spelled the end of his F1 career.
It was now or never.
WHY HAS THIS HAPPENED NOW?
But still, why has this happened so quickly? Why not at the mid-season break, or after the European season? Even waiting until the end of the year would have been unlikely to have materially altered AlphaTauri’s season given its uncompetitive car.
There are several reasons Ricciardo’s rapid elevation is preferable for all parties — bar De Vries, obviously.
Horner is understood to be one of the Aussie’s key backers in the Red Bull set-up, but Helmut Marko, perhaps still smarting from his gamble on De Vries flopping, is said to be not yet convinced.
With so little on the line at AlphaTauri this season, Marko saw a chance to drop Ricciardo into a live seat and let him sink or swim.
This is a key consideration for the last 12 races of the season, particularly once Ricciardo has properly settled in after the mid-season break.
The sudden promotion is not a favour for Ricciardo. It’s a test.
He’s no longer the prodigal son returned to the arms of the Red Bull family. He’s back in the meat grinder.
He has 12 races to prove he’s back to his best or at least close enough to it that any doubts over his long-term potential are fully dispelled.
Anything less than that and another driver switch will be on the cards at the end of the year.
That’s the other reason a mid-season test is so convenient for the Red Bull program. Whereas having an unproven Ricciardo and a potentially title-winning Lawson on the books in November would have presented a line-up conundrum, the team can at least answer half of that question by getting the Daniel part of it out of the way.
If Ricciardo sinks, Lawson’s promotion becomes a no-brainer.
While you wouldn’t expect a top-performing Ricciardo to be troubled by Tsunoda, we still don’t know where the Aussie is on his form spectrum. The Japanese driver, still growing in strength, shouldn’t be underestimated.
And having struggled in a mid-grid McLaren car, it’d be fair to have doubts about how Ricciardo will go with what is the least competitive car in Formula 1 — and a car that’s already killed the career of one other driver at that.
It’s the chance Ricciardo was hoping would arrive, but it also comes with it enormous risk.
Awkard exchange in snubbed grid chat | 00:39
THE BIG ONE: WHAT ABOUT SERGIO PÉREZ?
It’s the question everyone wants answered. What does this mean for Sergio Pérez?
Red Bull Racing says it has its arms around the struggling Mexican, not least because he’s contracted until the end of 2024. It’s confident he can get back to the winning ways that briefly made him look like a title protagonist at the start of the season.
That’s probably true. But now that patience has a time limit attached.
That works two ways.
Red Bull loves testing its drivers by ratcheting up the pressure. It loves a sink-or-swim examination.
Having Ricciardo on the grid is Pérez’s test. If he was under the impression that his seat is safe and he has time to work through his problems, that’s been blasted away by this sudden signing.
It’s also a not-so-subtle reminder of how Red Bull tends to deal with its driver contracts: ruthlessly. Pérez’s 2024 deal will mean nothing if there’s a clearly better option available.
Let’s go back to some comments made by Helmut Marko at the weekend to Germany’s Sky Sport.
“[Pérez’s race pace is] what distinguishes him from Nyck de Vries,” he said. “There’s no need for action at the moment. There’s no-one who could replace him.”
There was evidently no faith De Vries could become a driver capable of replacing Pérez.
But by the end of the season the team might have someone who could do the job.
Ricciardo has been explicit that his end game is to get back into a Red Bull Racing cockpit. He’s described it as his “fairytale” final career chapter.
The only reason he’s reneged on his previous position of not accepting a race drive at the back of the grid — and AlphaTauri is dead last in the championship with only two points — is because there’s a direct connection to Red Bull Racing, the best performing team in Formula 1.
If you needed any more hints, just consult Red Bull Racing’s press release, which describes Ricciardo as “on loan” to AlphaTauri, a point Horner reiterated in his comments.
“We are excited to see what the rest of the season brings for Daniel on loan at Scuderia AlphaTauri,” said the team boss.
While AlphaTauri and Red Bull Racing drivers are all contracted centrally to Red Bull, the fact it’s mentioned several times frames the whole situation with a certain urgency.
This move isn’t for the long term. It may not even be for more than six months.
This is just the first step of Daniel Ricciardo’s comeback. We won’t have to wait long to find out how far it’s destined to go.