The driver who beat Sebastian Vettel at his own team has suddenly fallen behind a young teammate at McLaren. Can he get back to a leading role?
When Daniel Ricciardo arrived at Red Bull Racing in 2014, he was expected to be Sebastian Vettel’s quiet sidekick. He was there, it seemed, to give Red Bull a second driver capable of winning races that would also be willing to stay out of the way of the company’s leading man. Ricciardo beat the reigning four-time world champion head to head that season instead. Seven years later, he finds himself on the wrong end of a similar situation.
This is the thirteenth installment of our driver-by-driver preview of the 2022 Formula 1 season. This weekend, we will be covering McLaren. You can find the rest of our previews here.
Ricciardo is a race winner with McLaren, an already-successful relationship that seems to be steady whether or not he is the team’s lead driver. The question is whether or not he can compete for a championship with the team, something that becomes significantly more difficult if he is not regularly competitive with his own teammate.
How He Got Here
Daniel Ricciardo, like so many F1 drivers, got to the sport through an optimistic Red Bull Racing farm system that spent the 2010s seemingly churning out as many F1 drivers as possible. Having been in cars since 2005 and highlighting his junior career with a runner-up finish in the then-crucial Formula Renault 3.5 series in 2010, Red Bull called him up to a mid-season replacement seat at the independent Hispania Racing Team in 2011. A year later, he was at their Scuderia Toro Rosso junior team.
Ricciardo’s two years at Toro Rosso were not particularly notable, but his call-up to Red Bull led to immediate success. He won three races in 2014, enough to finish third in the championship and beat preseason favorite Sebastian Vettel in the championship by 61 points. It led him to a brief leading role at Red Bull while the team was between eras of power, but he lost that title quickly when the team called up Max Verstappen and made their young prospect a clear preference. Ricciardo left for Renault, where he put together two strong seasons highlighted by fifth in the 2020 championship.
But he wanted more, and he felt McLaren offered a better opportunity to get it. So he left Renault, the team where he had been a dominant midpack force for two years, to join the papaya orange crew in 2021.
How 2021 Went
Ricciardo quickly found himself struggling to adapt to the new car. While he steadily finished in the points, he was routinely outshined by young teammate Lando Norris in both qualifying and racing. Norris, who struggled to compete with teammate Carlos Sainz Jr. the past two seasons, established himself as a future star in the sport. Ricciardo showed that his existing star might not be as strong as it was thought to be as recently as the 2020-2021 offseason.
He had one all-time highlight, though. At Monza, Ricciardo led a 1-2 for a McLaren team that had been lost since Lewis Hamilton left in 2013. It was a crowning moment not just for Ricciardo but for Zak Brown, the racing executive at McLaren that had been leading a wholesale company turnaround since November of 2016. The McLaren that has been reshaped in a new image is a winning team, something Ricciardo made happen.
Goals for 2022
McLaren’s quick rise up the grid is a real reason for optimism in 2022. This team could be among the real contenders for not just weekly race wins but championships. It raises a valuable question for both Ricciardo and Norris: Which driver will be the one fighting for a title?
If the team is good enough for the question to be relevant, they will have the entire first half of the season to make a decision. If McLaren is somehow the only competitive team, they will be allowed to fight among themselves. But, in the more likely situation that McLaren is among the best teams but the competition is fierce, the team will have to back whichever horse is consistently putting together the strongest finishes.
Strong early finishes will be key to Ricciardo earning that chance. We still won’t know exactly how competitive McLaren is as a team until the first race of the season, so this may be a moot point ahead of another mid-field season, but Ricciardo will have to be on his guard early in the off chance that this is the championship run he dreamed of when he joined the grid’s most orange team.
A Successful Season Looks Like …
Whether or not McLaren makes a leap toward contention, a season without another win would be a step back for the entire team. If the car is capable of winning at all, Ricciardo should be capable of winning, too.
A strong bounce-back season will be one where McLaren’s older driver stays somewhere near level with his younger teammate, finds the top step of the podium again, and gets back to the top five in the championship standings. If he can do those three things, he will be back on track as one of Formula 1’s most enthusiastic stars.
From: Road & Track
Keyword: McLaren's Daniel Ricciardo Needs to Match the Hype