Ricciardo's career is modern F1's ultimate case of 'What if?'

Daniel Ricciardo should go down as one of the best and most consequential drivers of the past 15 years in Formula 1, even if results of more recent times may not have reflected the talent he had.

Ricciardo’s departure from RB — finally confirmed on Thursday — was a prolonged farce that forced him into a tearful and undignified exit at the Singapore Grand Prix, where Red Bull left him to fend off swirling rumours about his future in the build-up to the event and then let him go into the race without clarity on where he stood. After the race and his now-famous fastest-lap sign-off, it was clear Ricciardo knew what almost everyone else did: his world championship career was over.

F1 drivers come and go, but the reaction to Ricciardo’s departure — an outpouring of affection for the Australian and considerable frustration at how Red Bull treated one of the sport’s favourite characters — proved he has been one of the few who can say he truly resonated with F1’s fanbase.

On a pure performance level, many would happily take the stats Ricciardo walks away with: 257 race starts with five different teams, eight wins (for context, Lando Norris and Charles Leclerc have eight wins between them), three pole positions and 32 visits to the podium, many of which featured his famous shoey celebration: the act of chugging champagne from his sweaty race boot and, occasionally, getting the likes of Lewis Hamilton to begrudgingly go along with him.

It’s a sight we haven’t seen in a while. His unlikely win for McLaren at the 2021 Italian Grand Prix was his last appearance on an F1 podium.

The previous seven wins came with the Red Bull family that treated him so poorly at the end. That stint with Red Bull between 2014 and 2018 seems like a distant memory, and given his struggles with McLaren and RB, it would be easy to forget how good Prime Ricciardo was — in fact, some might not have seen it at all.

The perpetually grinning Australian can be given at least some of the credit for the wave of popularity F1 continues to ride into the middle of this decade. The genesis of that boom is usually considered to have been the Netflix smash hit series “Drive to Survive,” which turned Ricciardo from an ambitious racing driver into a bonafide superstar. He was the first driver to realise the opportunity that the streaming service was providing him and his fellow competitors, and he grabbed it with both hands.

His endearing personality shone through in the first season, which featured the decision to leave Red Bull for Renault as a major narrative. That crossroads moment ultimately had a negative impact on his career in terms of on-track results, but the exposure he gained from Netflix was a springboard to a level of popularity that was previously reserved for only the sport’s most successful drivers.

Many new to the sport will know Ricciardo more for his on-camera antics — the amusing interviews, the funny way of saying teammate’s names — rather than for the on-track prowess he displayed in his prime. There’s a whole generation of his own fans who never got to see him at his best. From his breakout season in 2014, when he outclassed teammate Sebastian Vettel and won three races in a season otherwise dominated by Mercedes, right through to 2018, Ricciardo was considered one of the coming men of the sport.

That first season at Red Bull was truly staggering. If you think this year’s emergence of Oscar Piastri has been impressive, Ricciardo’s was even better.

Pitted against Vettel, the defending four-time world champion, Ricciardo immediately looked like he belonged at the front of the field. Vettel famously struggled to master the new generation of cars introduced in 2014, but for Ricciardo, the opposite was true. When Mercedes dropped the ball that season, it was always Ricciardo who capitalised: he took a hat trick of victories in his first year with Red Bull, winning in Canada, Hungary and Belgium.

Vettel left for Ferrari at the end of the season, his reputation dented by Ricciardo’s huge first year as his teammate.

Four more victories would follow in an era that saw Red Bull held back by their underpowered and unreliable Renault power unit. Midway through the 2018 season, Ricciardo was in his third year as teammate to Max Verstappen, but the Australian enjoyed the reputation for being the far more polished of the two. While Verstappen had the raw talent, he was young, impatient and too aggressive behind the wheel; Ricciardo had the racing chops and the patience to wait for an opportunity before striking a decisive blow. It was he who would be the biggest threat to Mercedes and Ferrari.

If his race-winning pass on Valtteri Bottas in China that season boiled down Ricciardo’s race craft in one neat catchphrase — “lick the stamp and send it,” he said of his motivation — his second victory of 2018, six weeks later in Monaco, distilled the heights of his career into a single image: the post-race celebratory swan dive into the swimming pool atop Red Bull’s hospitality unit. In that moment, as he gracefully fell into the crystal-clear water, it felt like Ricciardo was a champion-in-waiting; Red Bull would surely contend again, and when they did, he would surely have a shot at a world championship.

Remarkably, though, that Monaco win was a landmark for different reasons. He would never stand on the podium again in Red Bull colours. No one knew it then, but the win on the streets of Monte Carlo and the splash into the pool that followed would be the high-point of a career that looked destined for so much more.

The decision that changed everything

Hindsight makes geniuses of pundits, but Ricciardo’s departure from Red Bull at the end of that season even seemed odd at the time. Team principal Christian Horner was dumbfounded by it; he has joked that he nearly drove off the road in disbelief when Ricciardo phoned him, several days into that year’s summer break, to say he had signed for Renault. Ricciardo had put pen to paper on an offer from the Enstone outfit during a flight from Europe to Los Angeles after months of back and forth with Red Bull.

Horner has always maintained that he would have understood if Ricciardo had moved to Mercedes or Ferrari given that they were fighting each other for a championship in 2018, but he could not understand why Ricciardo, who had complained about the lack of reliability coming from Red Bull’s Renault power units, had joined the company that was struggling so badly to master the V6 turbo hybrids.

Ricciardo had been growing disillusioned behind the scenes for a while. The emergence of Verstappen had changed the dynamics of the team, and the big contract extension the Dutchman signed at the end of 2017 was a pivotal moment. Ricciardo grew concerned Red Bull was becoming Verstappen’s team. Red Bull did not help assuage this feeling. When talking to sources about that year, one moment stands out — ironically, it took place in the very same Red Bull motorhome where he took the flop into the pool after winning in Monaco.

Several days earlier, Ricciardo, his father Joe and his agent Glenn Beavis sat with Horner and Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko to discuss the future. During the course of the conversation, Marko said off the cuff that Red Bull wanted to win the title “with Daniel in 2018 and with Max in 2019 and 2020.” It was quickly pointed out to Marko that Red Bull were unlikely to beat Mercedes or Ferrari to the title that year. According to those who were there and who heard about it later, an exacerbated Horner then slapped Marko on the leg and told tried to reassure the Ricciardos that Red Bull did not, in fact, think like that, but it added fuel to a growing fire.

Then came Baku, and Ricciardo’s collision with Verstappen. The Australian was convinced his teammate was 100% at fault, but felt the blame was deflected his way in the days afterwards. These instances, and other small moments, built within Ricciardo a feeling that he would never truly get a fair shake against Verstappen if and when Red Bull ever built a title-winning car.

Ricciardo’s issue was never with Verstappen, the pair have always remained on good terms, but he wanted to ensure that he was given equal treatment. A touching moment after Sunday’s Singapore Grand Prix was the now-35-year-old revealing that Verstappen had been the only driver to reach out to him after the Japanese Grand Prix this year, when a fairly miserable weekend ended with Ricciardo in the wall after a first-lap tangle with Alex Albon. It was the first time this year that Ricciardo’s seat felt like it was in imminent danger.

“I think Max has grown into obviously a great driver but a very mature young man,” Ricciardo told Sky Sports. “He’s always been very appreciative of our friendship and supportive — even after Japan this year, I was getting quite a lot of stick and he was one of the only guys who sent me a text and said, ‘Mate, keep your head up. We know what you’re capable of. Don’t listen to the noise.’ I respect and appreciate him a lot.”

The success of “Drive To Survive” meant Ricciardo’s star was on the rise, and ahead of his debut season with Renault, he signed with American marketing giant CAA Sports. The goal was simple: to turn Ricciardo into the biggest name the sport had to offer. It was obvious, though, that his career trajectory had become uncertain. Some at the agency, which also works closely with Red Bull, have privately admitted that they would have liked to have signed Ricciardo before he left the team. Ricciardo split with the manager who negotiated the deal, Beavis, at the end of 2018, in fairly acrimonious circumstances.

The CAA link has paid dividends in the years since, with Ricciardo afforded opportunities most F1 drivers do not get. He has appeared on Ellen and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, while he kicked off 2023 on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He’s launched his own clothing line (Enchante) and his own brand of wine (DR3) while he was also drafted in by Hulu to work on a scripted F1 drama series that is still in production. Even more recently, when Visa and Cash App signed a deal to rebrand Red Bull’s second team, Ricciardo’s presence was vital.

His marketing prowess has always been clear, but while his star shot upward away from the track, his opportunities to excel on it waned.

Ricciardo found at Renault what Piastri, Fernando Alonso, Otmar Szafnauer and plenty more have found in the years since: a rudderless team, devoid of proper leadership from the top and without a clear flightpath to achieving its lofty goals of winning titles. There were still glimpses of Prime Ricciardo — he scored memorable podiums in the COVID-shortened 2020 season at the Nürburgring and at Imola — but despite improving from 9th to 5th in two years with the team, Ricciardo went into that campaign having already signed a deal with McLaren for 2021.

The partnership with McLaren was supposed to be the big one. Company CEO Zak Brown initially saw Ricciardo as a vital piece in the championship-contending operation he was putting together. Two major issues ensured the partnership would not be a success. One was Ricciardo’s failure to ever properly adapt to McLaren’s car, with issues continuing deep into his second year with the team. And second was his teammate; many had framed Ricciardo as McLaren’s new team leader when he arrived, but Norris quickly out-shone Ricciardo, and that simply made the Aussie’s struggles in the car look even worse.

That 2021 Italian Grand Prix win was the one good glimpse at Prime Ricciardo in the papaya orange of McLaren. He and Norris had qualified second and third, wedged between that year’s title contenders Verstappen and Hamilton, who most expected to disappear into the distance to continue their epic championship battle. When the two collided and ended up beached in the gravel just before mid-race distance, Ricciardo did not need a second invitation, holding the lead at a safety car restart and completing a memorable victory.

The Verstappen-Hamilton battle that raged on that year must have given Ricciardo pause for thought. Sources have told ESPN that he has privately said he regretted leaving Red Bull; in an alternate universe, he may have made the 2021 title fight a three-way battle.

Outside of the glory of Monza, Ricciardo’s average finish in 2021 was 8.45. His tenure with McLaren did not get any better in 2022, and by the summer break of that year he and Brown were discussing an early end to the three-year deal they had signed.

There were times during that year that Ricciardo’s personality backfired on him, with his habit of deflecting tougher questions with a joke or a light-hearted dig at himself sometimes coming across in an unintended manner. There was the time he entered the paddock on a horse ahead of the U.S. Grand Prix, just weeks after the announcement that he would leave McLaren at the end of the year. Whatever his intention, the stunt did not have the desired effect of being just another humorous Ricciardo moment; to some, he looked like someone who had stopped taking the sport seriously.

That appeared to be the end of his F1 career. Then Red Bull swooped in.

The energy drinks giant signed him to be their reserve driver for 2023, but eventually Ricciardo embarked on a full-fledged return, with the spiralling Nyck de Vries being dropped by AlphaTauri (now RB) in July. Ricciardo returned after a much-hyped test at Silverstone where his lap times were, according to various reports, close to what Verstappen had posted in the same car a week earlier at the British Grand Prix.

It felt like the beginning of an incredible comeback tale.

The potential payoff was obvious: replacing Sergio Pérez at Red Bull and returning to the team he should have never left. Ricciardo saw it as the logical final chapter of his story in Formula 1. It never quite worked out how he wanted it to, though.

The early stages were promising, but his comeback was sidetracked by the Dutch Grand Prix practice crash that left him with a broken hand. He sat out that race and the four that followed, allowing Liam Lawson to impress in his absence. Ricciardo returned and, although he scored an important seventh place for the team at the Mexican Grand Prix, both the momentum and buzz around his comeback seemed to have disappeared by the end of the campaign.

This year, Ricciardo never quite took off, his struggles exacerbated by the rich vein of form teammate Yuki Tsunoda tapped into early in the season. The Australian found himself in a bizarre situation ahead of the summer break: reported to be both in line to replace Pérez at Red Bull while simultaneously under threat of losing his RB seat to Lawson.

The situation highlighted the turmoil behind the scenes at Red Bull. Ricciardo’s future became a proxy battle in the power struggle between Horner (who wanted him to stay) and Marko (who wanted him to be replaced by Lawson). Ultimately, Ricciardo could not find the spark that would have given Horner the justification he needed for Red Bull’s shareholders to keep him on. In all of that mess, even the pull of RB’s big-money partners was not enough to keep him on board.

When it came to the decisive moment, one of the most marketable F1 drivers of recent times found that, when crunch time comes, results outweigh anything else.

It’s hard to know exactly what Ricciardo’s legacy in F1 will be. Some may focus on the prowess of those Red Bull days, others on the man they saw on “Drive To Survive,” some may even reflect on the knowledge that the Ricciardo they came to watch in real time was not the same as the Ricciardo they had seen on Netflix. Maybe all three are correct. Regardless, Ricciardo should be remembered as a consequential part of F1’s recent story — at his best on track, he always wanted to make you want to watch — and the sport will be worse off without him.