It’s been a long time since Daniel Ricciardo has had a weekend as strong as this.
It might feel galling to say at the end of a round in which he qualified and finished 13th. This is a multiple grand prix winner we’re talking about, not a rookie targeting a breakout result.
But it’s easy to forget in the feel-good haze of Ricciardo’s comeback just how big a struggle his two seasons at McLaren were.
Watch the Formula 1 Belgian Grand Prix 2023 live and ad-break free in racing on Kayo Sports on Sunday, 30 July, at 11:00pm AEST. New to Kayo? Start your free trial now >
His 2022 campaign in particular was packed with wrong turns and false dawns as he struggled to tame an unpredictable car that had already proven itself to be maladapted to his driving style.
“I felt obviously for whatever reason the McLaren was normally not speaking my language,” he said. “I felt like especially last year it was just a bit of a stalemate and it was really hard to get out of that.”
But back at AlphaTauri, he and the car are speaking mutually intelligible tongues — and not just because Ricciardo says he’s brushing off his Italian now he’s back at Faenza.
Even before he got into the cockpit it was clear Ricciardo was having a positive effect on the team.
You only need to watch the video of his first visit to the Faenza factory last week to recognise how excited the team is to not only welcome back a former driver but also work with such an established talent.
For almost its entire existence AlphaTauri has been tasked with building up F1 rookies. While the team has been able to count some genuine prodigies among its alumni, blooding young guns always comes at the cost of slowed development given the time it takes for a driver to get comfortable in the category before giving good feedback.
But here is an opportunity for the team to tap into a deep reservoir of experience to try to haul an undeniably disappointing car off the back of the grid.
That reflects back onto Ricciardo too. A driver who’s always needed to feel the backing of his team, this sort of atmosphere has obviously buoyed him. His comeback approach is to do things his own way, the way that worked for him at Red Bull Racing, and AlphaTauri is empowering him to do that.
The sum of that was a clear line of progress from the moment the Aussie got back in the car for practice through to his performance in the race. The forward motion was constant. The momentum was clear. And the result reflects a weekend of hard work that delivered as strong a result as was possible for the machinery.
FRIDAY
For a driver in need of representative mileage, Friday couldn’t have started any worse for Ricciardo. Sergio Pérez’s crash and subsequent red flag closed the track for the precious few dry minutes available before heavy rain unexpectedly fell, and there was no serious running for the rest of the hour given the dry forecast for the rest of the weekend.
Second practice had to be productive, and Ricciardo was in full absorption mode over four flying laps on the medium tyre —a compound that ended up being decisive to his race outcome.
He started the session with a time of 1 minute 21.017 seconds. It was some 0.34 seconds slower than teammate Yuki Tsunoda.
A look at the telemetry shows the Aussie adjusting his braking points, and on-board footage shows him experimenting with lines. By the end of his run of four flying laps he’d improved his time by 1.493 seconds.
The progress was good in the first and second sectors, though the slow final split remained a weak point.
Importantly, he’d got down to just 0.049 seconds within Tsunoda’s best time, an improvement of almost 0.3 seconds for the day.
But he couldn’t keep pace on the softs, losing time to his teammate in the first corner and the final sector. He ended up 0.451 seconds adrift.
He acknowledged that he’d failed to maximise the fresh rubber — as much was evident from his follow-up lap, on which he was up by as much as 0.21 seconds in the middle of the lap before his tyres faded to nothing.
“I think a bit more out of me [is to come], and for sure there are some things already I feel in the car that we can try and work on,” Ricciardo said. “Right now I’m quite optimistic. It looked like Yuki as well had a pretty good day. I think if we put all these things together, maybe tomorrow we can do okay.”
‘Yeah that was not fair Zak!’ | 01:20
SATURDAY
Final practice came and went with Ricciardo 0.237 seconds slower than Tsunoda on the hard tyre — the mandatory Q1 compound — but 0.328 seconds faster on the medium compound, having found big gains mainly through the chicane.
The medium was always going to be the key race compound, and Ricciardo was making progress where it counted. That would come back to benefit him in the race.
That was particularly impressive given the team later found damage on his floor, which was replaced before qualifying.
And qualifying was particularly high stakes at the weekend, when the teams at the back of the field were very closely matched around one of the sport’s shorter circuits. Tiny differences would be decisive.
Tsunoda was 0.118 seconds faster on their first runs in Q1. He was losing bucketloads of time in the first corner but earnt it back by the middle sector and moved ahead in Ricciardo’s weaker final split.
Their second laps followed much the same pattern, with Ricciardo faster in the first sector and Tsunoda levelling with him by the third split, but this time Yuki overdrove into the final split and failed to improve.
Ricciardo pipped him by just 0.013 seconds.
It was enough to make it into Q2, where he used the mediums to outqualify Lance Stroll and Pierre Gasly in faster machinery to start four places ahead of Tsunoda.
Saturday was a great success with some important conditions.
The first is obviously that the superfine margins in the midfield meant a small advantage had a disproportionately large effect on starting position. Four places belied the closeness between him and Tsunoda.
The second is that Tsunoda had damaged his new front wing on Friday and was left using an older specification. A new part as important as that can easily account for a difference as slim as 0.013 seconds.
The third is that Tsunoda failed to improve with his final lap. Had he found the same time in percentage terms as Ricciardo, he would have been through to Q2 around 0.119 seconds at his teammate’s expense.
Of course that’s on Tsunoda. The challenge of qualifying is to constantly find incremental gains, and he clearly left time on the table in the final sector.
But a relatively small difference on Saturday could have flipped the narrative.
Ricciardo buoyant after first race back | 01:18
SUNDAY
First stint
While qualifying was a handy boost for Ricciardo, realistically it will take time for a driver to get comfortable enough in a car to squeeze every last tenth of a second from it.
Race conditions, when experience and a cool head can count for more, were always going to be where the old Ricciardo needed to show himself.
And despite finishing exactly where he started, in 13th, Sunday was an excellent day for the Aussie — so long as you forget about the first lap, when he was punted into Esteban Ocon by an errant Zhou Guanyu and ended up 18th and effectively last, undoing all his good qualifying work.
He spent the first stint stuck behind Logan Sargeant at the tail of the field, but the defining moment of his race came just after his first pit stop.
Second stint
Ricciardo made his first change on lap 18 and emerged from pit lane in last place and around four seconds behind Sargeant.
And he was rapid — but for only a handful of laps. By lap 25 he was back in the dirty air of the Williams, and his times dropped off markedly again.
So he hatched an alternative strategy.
He encouraged his team to give him second tyre change just 11 laps after his first. It would send him to the back of the pack again and would force him into an ultra-long 40-lap final stint, but he’d be on the faster medium tyre and in clear air, with no driver ahead of him to slow him down.
It proved an inspired call.
Third stint
The time spent in clear air undercut him ahead of Sargeant, who stopped five laps later, but had its greatest effect on Nico Hülkenberg, Tsunoda and Zhou, who were stuck in a stalemate on the uncompetitive hard tyre for long middle stints, none of them willing to blink before the other and commit to a too-long final stint in a race of high tyre degradation.
It was to their detriment. They all stopped between nine and 15 laps after Ricciardo and fell so far off the back of the pack that they never stood a chance of catching him.
But it wasn’t enough just to have a clever strategy. The execution had to be flawless.
Ricciardo’s pace barely deviated over a race-high 40-lap stint. His first representative lap was a 1 minute 24.161 seconds. His penultimate lap of the race was a 1 minute 24.059 seconds.
That level of consistency — to push the tyres lap after lap without tipping them into runaway thermal degradation — is a difficult and particular skill with Pirelli’s bespoke Formula 1 tyres.
It’s the sort of thing only experience and confidence can buy.
PIT TALK: Max Verstappen claims Red Bull Racing‘s 12th consecutive victory, a new benchmark for dominance in Formula 1; McLaren gets another second place in a boost to the British team; and Daniel Ricciardo ticks some big boxes on an understated impressive first race back.
The pace was so strong that Ricciardo suspected points would have been on the table had he not been stuck in 18th after the first lap.
It’s a difficult theory to test. Aston Martin clearly has a faster car and locked out ninth and 10th, with Lance Stroll around 15 seconds ahead of 11th-placed Alex Albon’s Williams at the flag. Perhaps a strong start to get into the points-paying places would have unlocked a route for Ricciardo to stay there.
That said, in a scenario that doesn’t feature a first-lap crash, he’d have also been battling the faster Alpine cars, and both Alfa Romeo cars were also ahead of him on the grid too.
But points won’t be a measure of Ricciardo’s success. An ability to get the most out of his car — which remains among the slowest — is the most important indicator, even if it’s a more nebulous one.
It’s hard to argue that Ricciardo didn’t achieve that this weekend. Beating his teammate in qualifying and the race is the de facto measure, and though the margins were much closer than they looked, the bottom line is that Dan did the business.
And ironically his cause might actually have been helped by the first-lap crash that prompted his ambitious strategy gamble.
The tactics gave him a long, uninterrupted stint on one tyre to poke and prod his new car’s limits in race conditions without being stuck in a DRS train managing temperatures and dealing with other drivers.
It’s the sort of thing that will turbocharge his adaptation to the car, allowing him to take an extra step forward in his understanding of where he needs to improve and where he can improve the car.
Given he has only 11 more races in what is, for now, a limited-time comeback, every extra step he can take could prove decisive in whether his career ends or continues come November.
In that and other respects, it’s hard to say Ricciardo’s first race back was anything other than a success.
