As he prepares to leave the F1 grid, just how good was Daniel Ricciardo?

Only Webber (42 podiums) has more visits to the rostrum than Ricciardo (32) among Australian drivers, while statistically, Ricciardo’s best season came in 2016, when he scored 256 world championship points, took one win and seven other podium finishes, and recorded the fastest race lap four times.

The eye test

The numbers only tell part of the Ricciardo story, and do little to explain the impact he’s made in the sport across his 12 seasons. Ricciardo’s early career was a slow burn, and while flashes of promise indicated he was quick enough – he qualified a stunning sixth in Bahrain for Scuderia Toro Rosso in just his fourth race of his first full-time season in 2012 – that same race showed how green he was, getting bullied back to 16th after the first lap of the grand prix the following day.

Once he won what was effectively a shootout with French teammate Jean-Eric Vergne for a seat at Red Bull Racing to replace the retiring Webber for 2014, Ricciardo’s confidence – and signature feel with his left foot on the brakes – soared. In a car that was some way off being the best on the grid, Ricciardo scored his first three wins in swashbuckling style, making two overtakes in the final five laps to win his maiden grand prix in Canada, and then passing Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton at the death to take victory in Hungary, decisive late-braking manoeuvres catching out both world champions in consecutive laps.

None of Ricciardo’s eight wins were straightforward or in the best machinery on the grid, his penchant for the dramatic only adding to his popularity, and only matched by a sense of mischief and quotable quips.

“Sometimes you’ve just got to lick the stamp and send it,” Ricciardo grinned after storming from sixth to first within 15 laps of the 2018 Chinese Grand Prix, his sixth F1 victory.

Toasting his wins and podium successes with a “shoey” – a sweaty racing boot filled to the brim with champagne – became his signature celebration and made him a social media megastar.

The peak

Ricciardo’s best year – given where it came from and who it was up against – was undoubtedly 2014, when he took on reigning four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel in equal machinery at Red Bull and dominated, taking three wins to Vettel’s none, and outscoring the German 238-167 over the season before Vettel decamped to Ferrari. It was a season that forced a rethink on Ricciardo’s – and by association, Vettel’s – standing in the sport.

“I knew it was a way for me to really benchmark myself, literally, against the best guy in the world at that time,” Ricciardo says of 2014.

“Beating him was huge. If he’d kicked my arse, it would have been ‘oh well, I’ve gone up against the best and clearly I don’t have what it takes’. Because of what I did, it made people definitely start to respect me, and that was huge for my career moving forward.”

Vettel, speaking on the Beyond the Grid podcast this week ahead of the final race of his career in Abu Dhabi before his retirement, gave Ricciardo his due.

“Daniel obviously had a mega year in 2014,” Vettel said.

“The truth is he out-performed me, in some of the races by quite a big margin, and I ran out of solutions.”

Ricciardo’s most consistent two-year run came at Red Bull in 2016-17, when he won two races and finished on the podium 17 times up against now two-time world champion Max Verstappen, beating the Dutchman in both campaigns.

The decline

Ricciardo’s decision to leave Red Bull for Renault at the end of 2018 was predominantly to “leave home”, as he put it, after his entire junior career in Europe from the age of 17 had been backed by the energy drinks company.

It was also partly, and predictably, because Verstappen was the team’s new golden boy, initially signed to a longer-term contract than Ricciardo based on potential rather than production. Ricciardo and Verstappen being blamed equally by the team after they crashed in the 2018 Azerbaijan Grand Prix – after Verstappen moved twice in front of Ricciardo in the braking zone for the first corner – only confirmed what Ricciardo, deep down, knew.

History shows that call ended Ricciardo’s time as a genuine threat for race wins and top results – he’s managed just three podiums in the four years since departing Red Bull – but arguably his biggest mistake was leaving Renault for McLaren at the end of 2020, not moving to Renault in the first place.

With the 2020 season start in Melbourne called off at the 11th hour because of COVID-19, Ricciardo decamped to his farm in rural Western Australia and decided to accept a 2021-23 offer from McLaren before he’d even raced Renault’s 2020 machine.

The 2020 season, once it eventually began, was one of Ricciardo’s finest and most underrated campaigns, finishing fifth in the world championship and snaring two podiums in a car teammate Esteban Ocon could only take to 12th in the standings.

It was also a case of wondering what might have been had he stayed.

The high point – singular – in two seasons at McLaren couldn’t have been higher, taking the team’s first win since 2012 when he led teammate Lando Norris in a 1-2 finish at the 2021 Italian Grand Prix, but Ricciardo was well off Norris’ pace for much of that season, and even further adrift this year as a new era of cars with wider tyres and more dependence on underfloor aerodynamics were alien to Ricciardo’s driving style, and visibly shredded him of confidence.

Sitting 12th in the drivers’ standings heading into Abu Dhabi, Ricciardo is on track for his worst championship finish since 2013, justifying McLaren’s decision in August to terminate his deal with the team for 2023.

The future

As the finish line to the 2022 season has come into sharper focus in recent races, Ricciardo has been bombarded with questions as to what comes next.

Whether he accepts the mooted Red Bull reserve drive or not, David Coulthard, Red Bull Racing’s first driver for its inaugural season in 2005 and a winner of 13 grands prix, feels Ricciardo needs to go back to basics to discover if the fire still burns – and if his halcyon days can be more than a memory growing smaller in the rearview mirror.

“I think he needs to step away, take stock and rediscover whatever it was that was working for him in the first part of his Formula One journey,” Coulthard told the In The Fast Lane podcast this week.

“He’s young enough and fit enough to be able to get back to that place.”

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