Ricciardo is returning home to Red Bull Racing — but should he have left in the first place?

Ricciardo’s return to Red Bull Racing has begged two key questions.

The first one is: will this get him back into a race seat?

The answer to that will depend on developments in the driver market next season and especially on how Sergio Perez fares alongside Max Verstappen in their third year as teammates, as considered here.

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The second question is far more difficult to solve.

If the road has led Ricciardo back into the arms of Red Bull, should he have left the team in the first place?

It’s a question that’s been asked since the Aussie announced his departure from the then four-time championship-winning team in 2018, not least by team principal Christian Horner. The Red Bull Racing boss couldn’t fathom why one of his program’s homegrown talents would abandon his race-winning car in favour of a midfield scrapper — and Renault, no less, whose engines were behind so many of Ricciardo’s immensely frustrating retirements.

It’s tempting to say that the last four years have been a monumental mistake.

In Ricciardo’s 232 career grands prix he’s scored eight wins, 24 other podiums, three pole positions and 1311 points.

Almost all of them came during his Red Bull Racing career.

Record at Red Bull Racing (139 races)

Points: 7.1 per race

Win rate: one win every 19.8 races

Podium rate: one podium every 6.6 races

Pole rate: one pole every 46.3 races

Record at Renault (38 races) and McLaren (44 races)

Points: 4 points per race

Win rate: one win every 82 races

Podium rate: one podium every 27.3 races

Pole rate: no pole positions

That alone doesn’t prove anything of course. Both Renault and McLaren are midfield teams, a league below Red Bull Racing’s performance. He signed on for each of them as projects, hoping to spearhead them to victories and championships in the long term.

But the nub of the question is what Ricciardo could have been achieving had he not left.

Red Bull Racing post-Ricciardo statistics (82 races)

Points: 25.4 points per race

Win rate: one win every 2.5 races

Podium rate: one podium every 1.2 races

Pole rate: one pole every 3.9 races

Drivers championships: one every two seasons

Even if you halve these strike rates to account for there being two drivers in a team — though Max Verstappen has been doing almost all the heavy lifting since Ricciardo left — those are considerable numbers Ricciardo could have been accumulating. And that’s without considering that the team has won two of the last four drivers titles.

SO WHY DID HE LEAVE?

Numbers alone don’t speak to why he packed his bags and left what he clearly knew was one of the sport’s heavy hitters for a mid-grid battler

Ricciardo had decided he needed to forge his own career path. He’s likened his return to Red Bull Racing to coming back home; back then he described it as moving out of home for the first time, to becoming an adult in the racing world.

Part of the reason was the increasingly Verstappen-focused environment, particularly after their coming together in Azerbaijan — and that’s something that’s been clear since he left, especially in recent weeks — as well as the desire to try to build a team around him elsewhere, the calling of so many of the sport’s great drivers.

Combined with the fact Red Bull Racing was only just sniping for victories when he left and was about to take a punt on the Honda power unit, which then had a reputation as being seriously unreliable, and you can understand the decision.

“I don’t have regrets,” he said last year when it was clear his former team had become title contenders again. “I made every decision for a reason.

“Every decision you make is a time or a moment in your life that is right or best at that time, so I certainly don’t look back with regret or question anything.”

He knowingly sacrificed immediate results at Red Bull Racing to target long-term success. It was at worst a calculated gamble, an educated guess.

THE RENAULT YEARS

It’s been too easy to dismiss his French foray as a waste of time or the beginning of his downfall, but the stats and his results suggest it was anything but that.

His two years at Enstone were some of the best we’d seen of Ricciardo.

In 2019, despite needing a number of races to adjust down to a midfield car, he had an easy handle on Nico Hulkenberg, outqualifying him by an average of 0.182 seconds and beating him 54-37 on points.

More impressive was that he was often ahead of at least one of the faster cars from chief rival McLaren. He was on average 0.029 seconds quicker than Carlos Sainz through the season and he beat Lando Norris 54-49 in the standings.

But it was in 2020 that he really shone.

He outqualified teammate Esteban Ocon every race bar two by an average of more than a quarter of a second, and he dominated him in the points 119-62.

He also finished an extremely commendable fifth in the standings behind Lewis Hamilton, Valtteri Bottas and Max Verstappen as well as Sergio Perez, whose Racing Point machine — the infamous ‘Pink Mercedes’, a design controversially based on the previous year’s Silver Arrow — was too quick for Renault.

He nonetheless finished just six points shy of the Mexican and smashed Lance Stroll in the sister car by 44 points courtesy of his two unlikely but hard-earned podium finishes.

The context for his achievements come via Fernando Alonso, who enjoyed one of his best post-championship seasons this year with some truly outstanding drives.

Alonso outqualified Ocon 11-10 and by an average of only 0.096 seconds excluding a trio of outlying races in Imola, Montreal and Austin.

Ocon beat Alonso in the points standings 92-81 anyway, and though the Spaniard obviously lost bundles more points through unreliability, it’s creditable that the Frenchman was close enough to his illustrious teammate to capitalise.

Ricciardo versus Ocon (2020)

Qualifying head-to-head: 15-2 to Ricciardo

Qualifying average: 0.257 seconds to Ricciardo

Race points: 119-62 to Ricciardo

Alonso versus Ocon (2022)

Qualifying head-to-head: 11-10 to Alonso

Qualifying average: 0.328 seconds to Alonso (0.096 seconds with outliers excluded)

Race points: 81-92 to Ocon

You’d have to say the numbers reflect well on Ricciardo’s time at Renault, even if you don’t consider Ocon a great or consistent yardstick.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Ricciardo’s Renault career didn’t start flawlessly. He needed time to adjust to the car, development efficacy was unpredictable and the team was poorly run as Renault attempted to revitalise the formerly neglected Enstone operation.

There were times that year that the Australian was clearly dispirited with his circumstances.

But the 2020 car was significantly better. It better suited his driving style, upgrades were better targeted and there were clear signs of forward momentum. Even the dysfunctional management structure seemed to pull together onto one page.

The problem is that Ricciardo made the decision to leave before he could see any of that happen.

He signed the McLaren contract before the first race of 2020, in the depths of the first pandemic shutdown and from the remoteness of his farm in Western Australia, having been courted online and by phone only.

There were clearly considerable push factors from Alpine — it’s difficult to ignore the fact that he, Alonso and now Oscar Piastri all left the team at the first opportunity, as did Carlos Sainz before Ricciardo’s arrival.

But it’s difficult to excuse Ricciardo’s move from Renault in the same way as his departure from Red Bull Racing.

He agonised over the first with the full facts available to him before making his call. Horner says he was even prepared to offer him identical terms to Verstappen to stay on for a flexible number of seasons.

While it would be obviously incorrect to say his move to McLaren wasn’t thoroughly thought through, the driver market was moving fast in the vacuum of lockdown and the delayed season, and Ricciardo had to make a call.

The call he made — leaving Renault, joining Alpine — proved to be the wrong one.

One wonders whether the outcome would have been the same had he waited until the season had started to make the call — had Renault had the chance to prove the project was coming together, the project he’d left Red Bull Racing to lead.

And had he stayed on, what could Ricciardo have achieved with the 2022 car under new regulations designed with three previous years of his technical feedback?

If Ricciardo finds himself back in a Red Bull Racing full-time seat and winning races — and maybe even competing for titles — then it may all be immaterial anyway.

But if we’ve already witnesses the end of his career, then history might reflect it was leaving Renault, not Red Bull Racing that ultimately wrote the final chapter.