Daniel Ricciardo has been linked to a mid-season return to AlphaTauri in the place of struggling rookie Nyck de Vries.
According to reports in the Italian media, Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko has handed De Vries an ultimatum to pick up the pace by June or face the axe.
Ricciardo, as the third driver for both Red Bull Racing and the sister AlphaTauri team, would be in line to step in.
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The Australian has already had a seat fitting for AlphaTauri, though that isn’t considered a sign of an imminent switch.
Instead the timing of the fitting is likely because fellow Red Bull Racing and AlphaTauri reserve driver Liam Lawson is set to miss two upcoming grands prix owing to Super Formula commitments.
But it comes after a disappointing start to life as a full-time Formula 1 driver for De Vries.
The Dutchman landed his AlphaTauri contract thanks to his 2021–22 Formula E championship and an impressive one-off appearance for Williams at last year’s Italian Grand Prix, at which he scored points with a ninth-place finish.
But his debut as a full-time driver has been significantly harder going.
Teammate Yuki Tsunoda has beaten him in all four races both have finished and holds a 5-1 head-to-head qualifying record.
Tsunoda has scored the team’s only two points with a pair of 10th-place finishes and an average finishing position of 10.6. De Vries’s best result so far is 14th, with an average finishing position of 15th.
Excluding the outlying Azerbaijan Grand Prix qualifying sessions, De Vries has been on average 0.295 seconds slower than Tsunoda. While the Japanese driver has one Q3 appearance to date, his rookie teammate is yet to break out of Q2.
It’s been disappointing enough for Marko to reportedly set the 28-year-old a three-race deadline to prove himself worthy of retaining his seat for the rest of the year.
The upcoming triple-header Emilia Romagna, Monaco and Spanish grands prix all take place on well-worn European circuits De Vries will be intimately familiar with. The logic of the test is that if De Vries is going to be able to perform well anywhere, he’ll perform well there.
If De Vries can’t lift his game, then the door may be open to an unexpected Ricciardo return to the Italian team he raced for in 2012–13.
IS THIS THE COMEBACK RICCIARDO IS LOOKING FOR?
Ricciardo is primed for an F1 return, saying at the Australian Grand Prix that he’s already leaning towards pursuing a full-time comeback for 2024.
As well as having been embedded in Red Bull Racing team at two races so far this season, he’s also undertaken several sessions in the simulator.
He’s since confirmed that he’s due to participate in at least one Pirelli tyre test this season in the 2023 Red Bull Racing car, which will both help him keep acclimatised to F1 machinery and correlate his sim work.
Speaking in Melbourne, team boss Christian Horner said he considered the Aussie to be “about 10 minutes away from being ready” to jump back in an F1 car as a full-time driver.
But Ricciardo has also said multiple times in the last six months that he would only consider a racing return with a leading team that would offer him the chance to score podiums.
On single-lap pace AlphaTauri is the least competitive team on the grid and is just one point off the bottom of the championship table.
It’s therefore unclear whether Ricciardo would see this as the opportunity he’s looking for to return to Formula 1.
ESPN has also reported that his contract does not offer him the opportunity to step into a full-time race drive with AlphaTauri.
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Further, Kiwi Liam Lawson has been considered the team’s first-choice reserve driver from the start of the season and is in attendance at most races this year in that capacity, skipping those that clash with his other racing commitments.
Lawson has been dispatched to Japan to compete in the Super Formula series this year, where early success has made him a title frontrunner. It’s the same junior pathway the Red Bull program used to prepare Pierre Gasly for Formula 1.
Red Bull has reportedly been impressed with the Formula 2 winner’s performances so far. Given he’s only 21 years old, further strong showings would could only lift his chances of becoming next in line to an AlphaTauri drive as a long-term prospect.
AlphaTauri, in its previous guise as Toro Rosso, has been historically unafraid to hand drivers mid-season debuts.
Though Ricciardo might be the more popular choice in the event De Vries’s F1 career meets an early F1 end, Lawson would likely be the preferred long-term candidate.
