Daniel Ricciardo says the prospect of being contracted to four different teams in six seasons was part of the reason he was turned off a possible Mercedes move for 2023.
Ricciardo confirmed last week that he will return to Red Bull Racing as a third driver next year, reuniting with the team for which he won seven of his eight victories.
He split with Milton Keynes at the end of 2018 for Renault, but in his second year with the French team he uprooted himself a second time to move to McLaren, where his career stalled off the back of two difficult seasons.
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After moulding the Renault car around him in his first season, he wasn’t able to have the same influence over the McLaren machine, sending him into a spiral of underperformance that got him sacked this August.
With no competitive drives available and eager to take a year off from racing, Ricciardo decided to seek a reserve driver role with a top team, and for several months Mercedes was rumoured to be interested in his services.
Lewis Hamilton is out of contract at the end of next season, and though he’s strongly signalled an intention to continue, there’s a paddock rumour that the Briton would hang up the helmet if he were to win an eighth championship.
Speculation then peaked in late October when Mercedes boss Toto Wolff was photographed wearing some of Ricciardo’s branded merchandise.
Speaking to the In the Fast Lane podcast, Ricciardo confirmed he’d entered into negotiations with Mercedes — he added it wasn’t the first time he’d been in talks with the German giant — and that it was buoying to know he was still highly rated despite his demoralising McLaren career.
“There were talks with Mercedes,” he said. “I was also appreciative of their engagement as well, because there was certainly an appetite for that.
“I think there was a part of me as well where of course even when I was at Red Bull, Mercedes was always ‘the’ team. Of course they were always dominating; it was a team I was looking at.
“I had some conversations with them back in the day, and to have a few more now was nice. Again, it was nice just still to be valued by obviously some top teams after the couple of years I’ve had.”
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But Ricciardo said the prospect of signing a contract for a fourth different team in six years after his last sudden move had gone so badly wrong was decisive in pushing him back towards Red Bull Racing.
“There was something about when the Red Bull thing became more serious it made more and more sense,” he said.
“I’ve obviously jumped around a bit in the last two years, and maybe a bit of familiarity would be good for me, to just go back and work with people I’ve worked with before and obviously a car — I appreciate the cars have changed now — that I gelled very well with.
“Just kind of jumping back and thinking about going to the sim work and doing all that, it just felt like, all right, this is probably the environment that will just settle me in best and make me figure out what’s the next step beyond this and what I really want after 2023.
“Let’s say [Mercedes] kind of stalled a little bit, and then the Red Bull stuff started to make more and more sense and had more and more legs, and then it naturally progressed as it did.”
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Ricciardo said he knew he’d made the right decision from the moment he put on the Red Bull Racing shirt back on for the first time — which the Red Bull media website says happened on the Sunday of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, some three days before the team confirmed the news.
“To go back full circle, it was really nice and it just felt warm and cosy. Sometimes you just get a feeling, and it felt right,” he said. “Putting the polo on, it was like, ‘Okay!’.
“It was cool, it was really nice. There were a lot of familiar faces that are still there who came up and sent me messages and stuff, and I was just like, okay, this is really cool.
“I’m proud of the challenges I took on in the last few years, and whether they worked or didn’t or however I feel about them or others do, it is what it is, but I’m proud of taking that plunge.
“But now returning back to where it all began, there’s something pretty special about that.”
