Red Bull Racing principal Christian Horner claims Daniel Ricciardo called him to apologise for leaving Milton Keynes during his tumultuous four years outside the team.
Ricciardo rejoined Red Bull Racing this season as a reserve driver after being dropped by McLaren with one year still to run on his contract. He took over from Nyck de Vries at the Red Bull-owned AlphaTauri team in July.
The Australian will line-up for the Italian squad alongside Yuki Tsunoda again next season with a view to taking Sergio Pérez’s seat at the senior squad in 2025.
Watch every practice, qualifying and race of the 2023 FIA Formula One World Championship live and ad-break free in racing on Kayo Sports. Join now and start streaming instantly >
It’s the same pathway Ricciardo trod to Red Bull Racing early in his career, putting the spotlight back on his original decision to leave the team at the end of 2018 to join Renault and then McLaren.
Ricciardo has insisted he has no regrets over his four years swapping teams only to end up back where he started.
But speaking on Dax Shepard’s Eff Won podcast, Horner claimed the Australian had called him to admit he had been wrong to leave Red Bull Racing.
“I think he recognised that he made a mistake. He had not good advice around him at the point that he left us.
“Having spent a few years outside of the family he suddenly realised that, ‘Whoa, actually what I had was really good’.
“Actually it was during the pandemic, I remember he called me and he said, ‘Christian, I hate to say this to you, but you were absolutely right, and I apologise’ and so on.”
It’s unclear which year Ricciardo might have made the phone call Horner claims he received.
The Australian endured a tough first year at Renault in 2019, but his second season was one of his best. He collected two podiums — his first in two years and the first for the team in a works capacity in a decade — and finished only six points behind Sergio Pérez in his former Red Bull Racing car in the drivers championship.
PIT TALK PODCAST: Max Verstappen is enjoying the most successful season in F1 history after seeing off Lando Norris in a surprisingly close battle for victory in Brazil. Meanwhile, the sport is considering new weekend formats to revitalise the sprint race for 2024.
But 2020 proved to be a high watermark for Renault, now Alpine, which has struggled to escape the midfield since the French brand returned to the sport in 2016.
Horner said Ricciardo had been the victim of bad management in switching from Milton Keynes to Enstone.
“There was an element of [spite] at the time, thinking, ‘You know what? Okay. Go and suck on the lemon for a bit’,” Horner said of his feelings when Ricciardo confirmed his intention to leave.
“He was very badly advised in his earlier career. Everybody f**ks up at some point.
“We gave Max a contract at the beginning of that year in 2018 to secure his future. Daniel, I remember being upset at the time. He suddenly felt that, ‘Hang on, I don’t want to be the support act here’.
“I could tell he was starting to think of being a bigger fish in a smaller pond. He got a lot of noise in his ear that this is the Max show. Money [from Renault] was also on the table.”
Ricciardo was managed by Glenn Beavis at the time of the decision, though he split with his long-time adviser before the start of the 2019 season to enlist management from CAA Sports.
Beavis subsequently took Ricciardo to court claiming more than £10 million in alleged unpaid commissions of 20 per cent of his Renault salary, which valued the two-year contract at around £50 million, or approximately $48 million per year.
The pair settled out of court at the end of 2019.
Red Bull CEO Dietrich Mateschitz had attempted to convince Ricciardo to stay by offering him equal terms to Verstappen, who was reportedly on approximately $15 million at the time.
“I was like, ‘Wow, do you know what we pay Max?’,” Horner said, recalling the conversation with Mateschitz. “And he went, ‘No. How much do we pay Max?’.
“I gave him the number and he said, ‘Who the f**k agreed to that?’. And I said, ‘Well, you did’.
“He said, ‘No, he’s a great guy. Let’s do it. Let’s give him the same deal that Max has’.”
The Ricciardo camp has long denied he was made an equal-terms offer, with ESPN reporting the Australian would have re-signed with the team if that had been the case.
Verstappen wins crash-filled Brazil GP | 02:52
Ricciardo made the decision to switch to McLaren in early 2020, before the start of the pandemic-delayed season, after just two seasons with Renault.
It proved a fateful call. His subsequent two seasons with Woking were dire but for a shock win at the 2021 Italian Grand Prix, and he was axed from the team with a year still to run on his contract.
Horner said it was in his difficult final rounds with McLaren that talks began to bring him back to Red Bull Racing in a non-driving role.
“It was horrible to see him just get worse and worse and worse,” Horner said. “It was actually this time last year in Mexico that I sat down with him in my hotel room and said, ‘Look, you need a complete reset. Take a year out. Come back to us. We’ve got a bunch of sponsors and a lot of marketing stuff’.”
Horner is said to be a principal backer of Ricciardo’s return prospects inside the Red Bull program, having pushed for him to get seat time in the current car that convinced Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko to sub him into AlphaTauri in the middle of the season.
Though Ricciardo is yet to get an extended clean run back in the sport, having missed five races with a broken hand immediately after the mid-season break, Horner said the upside of having the eight-time race winner fully firing was beyond doubt, recalling his first impression of the Australian and his rapid rise through the ranks.
“I remember going to watch him in Formula 3 and so on,” he said. “He really stood out — very smooth, just a great natural, almost like a Roger Federer kind of style behind the wheel: very, very classic, very light touch, great skill.
“We took Daniel as the junior with no expectation on him, and he started kicking [four-time champion Sebastian] Vettel’s arse. He won three races in 2014 when we had far from the best engine, and Sebastian never won a race that year.
“He’s the only one who won a race [at McLaren], and at Renault he put in some great performances.
“He’s a confidence guy. He’s got to feel the love. He’s got to feel comfortable in the environment he’s in. Some of his races for us were absolutely outstanding.
“When he’s got his mojo, he’s one of the fastest guys on the grid.”