Daniel Ricciardo has identified the McLaren trap he doesn’t want to fall into as he attempts to revive his Formula 1 career at the backmarker AlphaTauri team.
Ricciardo’s struggles during two largely fruitless years at McLaren are one of modern F1’s great mysteries. Having joined the British team as one of the sport’s most highly rated drivers, he left two years into a three-year contract thoroughly beaten by younger teammate Lando Norris and with his stocks at an all-time low.
A Red Bull Racing lifeline for 2023 gave him the chance to rediscover his mojo in the simulator, and after 10 races he found himself back on the grid with sister team AlphaTauri in the place of the ousted Nyck de Vries.
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Having reacclimatised to full-time racing in the two grands prix before the mid-season break, the Aussie has the rest of the season to justify his retention in 2024 with a view to taking Sergio Pérez’s Red Bull Racing seat the following season.
His job will be to prove that the McLaren cobwebs have been fully blown out of his performances, and having had six months to contemplate why the papaya switch failed, Ricciardo said he would approach his AlphaTauri chance more instinctively rather than bogging himself down in specifics.
“No disrespect, but I don’t want to get into that detail ever again,” Ricciardo told the F1 website of his struggles trying to work out the McLaren.
“I think even through year one at McLaren, kind of at the summer break, I’d learned that we’re probably going too much [into the details] and we need to change the approach a little bit.
“It was all in everybody’s best interests, trying to make it work, but I felt like I came to a realisation that wasn’t working for me.
“We still probably did too much in hindsight, but again, maybe that works for another driver. It is what it is.”
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Being thrown into the cockpit at the Hungarian Grand Prix with barely a week’s notice left him little choice but to adjust to the car on the fly.
“There were definitely things [in Hungary] I worked on, and Yuki was a good reference, especially coming out of the box — little bits of driving and kind of where the car could be on the limit in some areas of the track,” he said.
“There were certainly things that the engineers were showing me and saying, ‘Okay, I think you can probably do this here and improve that there’.
“There was some learning to be had, but I think also they wanted to see how I drive the car and kind of go from there. I was improving where I knew I could, but they were kind of just letting me drive it naturally and see where that ended up, and that was cool.”
Ricciardo’s move to AlphaTauri isn’t completely altruistic on Red Bull’s part. The sister team has slipped backwards under the new regulations, and though De Vries had been praised for his astute technical feedback, his lack of F1 experience meant he rarely got the most from the car.
It left the team with only Yuki Tsunoda as a benchmark for development, and though the Japanese driver has stepped up this year, he’s in just his third season in the sport and has raced only for AlphaTauri.
Inducting Ricciardo adds more than a decade of experience with several different teams into the mix, which will help turbocharge the Faenza squad’s recovery.
“I think the experience [I have] is certainly something,” he said. “It’s been mostly younger drivers [at the team]. To have not only someone who’s been in the sport for this long but also driven [with] other teams, it just probably gets them thinking a little bit more about things.
“I’m going to try and, I guess, probably maybe get them to think a little bit more outside the box in some areas. Naturally, from my experience, it might get them thinking in other ways. But also I need to see what this car likes and all of that.
“I felt they were definitely excited to have me and also hear what I had to say in the briefings and that. I tried not to hog the microphone, if you know what I mean, because I also don’t want to dish out 100 things out on the first weekend.
“I felt like there was certainly some curiosity about what I feel, what I felt before and how they can learn and build, because relatively it’s still a small team. Trying to implement some things is going to be fun.”
