“I’M SO SORRY,”
GRINS DANIEL RICCIARDO – in fact, his signature 1000-watt smile is briefly all GP Racing can see of him as the rest of his body flickers out of view on screen, briefly replaced by a papaya-coloured board bedecked in sponsor logos. “I seem to keep morphing into the background here…”
The slightly surreal practicalities of speaking face-to-face with racing drivers during a pandemic have served up a neat visual metaphor here, so no need to call tech support just yet: Ricciardo is thoroughly embedded at Mclaren, even though he’s only completed one race for the Woking equipe thus far. His dalliances with Mclaren go way back, much earlier than his previous flirtings with signing up back in 2018; earlier, even, than his furtive acquisition of a Mclaren 675 LT while he was still driving for Red Bull. One of his earliest memories of motor racing is of being taken to Adelaide to see the final Australian Grand Prix held there, scene of Ayrton Senna’s last victory… in a Mclaren.
“It’s hard to get caught up in it [Formula 1] when you’re in it. Being in F1 – all in – it’s hard to step away from it and actually reflect on those moments. And if I do, like now, if I take myself back to when I was a kid and think of all that, it’s kind of pinch myself kind of stuff – how I got here, literally talking about Mclaren, being a driver, because it’s pretty crazy.
“I sometimes don’t like to think about it too much, because it is a bit overwhelming. But it is actually nice to have that – to be able to look back, because I’m very appreciative to be in this position. Back when I was a kid I would never have thought in a million years of being here – I would have dreamed but never thought!
“As a kid, in my era at least, you knew two teams: Ferrari and Mclaren. And Senna, Prost, those are the names I remembered first as a kid, so I was always very familiar with Mclaren. It wasn’t until I got there, to the MTC [Mclaren Technology Centre], that I realised how kind of overwhelming Mclaren are in terms of their facilities. It still feels pretty surreal: all the cars down the boulevard, and the trophy cabinets are ridiculous. There’s so many trophies.
“But – and don’t get me wrong, all that’s nice, it’s awesome – but I signed with Mclaren because of what they’re currently doing, and all this [historic] stuff is the icing on the cake.”
Based on the current state of play there’s a strong argument to anoint Mclaren as F1’s third strongest team this season – which, on the face of it, makes Ricciardo’s decision to jump ship from Renault (now rebranded as Alpine) seem particularly smart and well-timed. That would be over-stating it somewhat. While Mclaren has been on a strong recovery trajectory over the past two seasons after a long and inglorious slump, when Ricciardo did the deal a full year ago it only had one of those seasons in the bank. That, and the promise of a new Mercedes engine supply arrangement starting this season.
Ultimately Mclaren’s form during 2020 vindicated Ricciardo’s move, as did the impression created by recently recruited team principal Andreas Seidl, who arrived just as Mclaren was setting its technical house in order during the early months of 2019. While running Porsche’s LMP1 programme Seidl worked with Mark Webber, who passed on a glowing reference to his fellow Aussie.
When Ricciardo was feeling for the exit at Red Bull in mid-2018 he entertained offers from both Mclaren and Renault, ultimately plumping for Enstone. This decision moved Webber to proclaim Ricciardo was essentially cashing out of F1 by taking a well-paid drive that would lead to nothing. Renault’s form in Ricciardo’s first season there essentially bore that theory out as the team required yet another bout of hirings and firings to produce a useful car.
Displaced by Ricciardo at Renault, Carlos Sainz moved to Mclaren and duly performed a career reboot which has enabled him to snag a seat at Ferrari. He also bonded with Mclaren CEO Zak Brown over a mutual love of golf. But, at the time, Brown’s pronouncements about this game of musical chairs seemed laced with regret at not landing Ricciardo. “You’ll just have to ask Daniel about it,” was how he rebuffed further enquiries. It feels like now is indeed right for
“IT STILL FEELS PRETTY SURREAL: ALL THE CARS DOWN THE BOULEVARD, AND THE TROPHY CABINETS ARE RIDICULOUS. THERE’S SO MANY TROPHIES”
GP Racing to do the honours… and ask Daniel about it (again).
“A couple of years ago, when I chose to go to Renault, I was excited about Renault’s position in the sport,” he says. “But I think it was also… I feel like I’ve said this a thousand times, but
I just felt like my time was done at Red Bull as well. I’d spent about 10 years of my career there, so I just felt it was time to move on.
“And then what I thought about Renault at that time, I then saw in Mclaren over the past 12-24 months. It’s a similar feeling, going from Renault to Mclaren as it was from Red Bull. But I certainly saw a lot of promise in the plan.
“I’ll be honest, [in 2018] there were days where I was Red Bull, there were days when I was Mclaren, days when I was Renault. On any given day, I was fine on all three of those teams. But, yeah, it came down pretty close to the wire. And to be honest, Red Bull was there until the end in my head. I kept going back and forth, thinking, ‘Ah, maybe I’ll just stay where I know.’
“Mclaren, I really liked the people, I felt like they had a good energy about them, a nice aura. But as you know, back in 2018, they were still in a rut and it was hard to see… I don’t even know if they predicted the step they were going to make in 2019, and 2020.
“So I kind of just had to see it first – and, yeah, they also didn’t sell me the dream. And I think that’s why I say 2019 and 2020 maybe surprised them as well. It was timing as opposed to anything, and I feel now is a pretty good time.”
It would be unwise indeed to arrive at a firm pecking order just one race into a season, even if Bahrain is a more representative venue than Albert Park, the usual opener. But Mclaren’s performance was impressive, albeit with a few caveats: Ricciardo and team-mate Lando Norris qualified sixth and seventh, separated by nine tenths from Max Verstappen’s Red Bull, four tenths from the slowest Mercedes, a quarter of a second behind Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari and just behind Pierre Gasly’s Alphatauri. Norris finished fourth, two places ahead of Leclerc, suggesting Mclaren has an edge on Ferrari; Alphatauri’s true potential is harder to measure, since Gasly hit Ricciardo early on, removing his own front wing and damaging Ricciardo’s floor.
What we can say of Ricciardo’s drive is that Norris usurped him at the start, then the combination of floor damage and losing track position in the first round of pitstops (he was
too close to Norris for the team to double-stack) consigned him to seventh at the chequered flag, unable to emulate Norris’s feat of passing Leclerc on track. But Dan was usefully ahead of both Aston Martins – indeed, he made short work of Sebastian Vettel after emerging from his first stop behind.
There are voices within Mercedes and Aston Martin claiming that the new aerodynamic restrictions have had a disproportionately large effect on the cars designed around a low-rake aero philosophy – ie Mercedes and Aston, whose car is essentially a clone of the 2019 championship-winning Merc. If so, and events in Bahrain appeared to bear it out, then Mclaren has got an early head start on the team it beat narrowly for third in last year’s constructors’ championship.
Mclaren’s MCL35M is, in common with several others on the grid, essentially a new car dressed up as a B-spec. Under the skin changes run deeper than those of its rivals, though, since Mclaren had to redesign and re-homologate the crash structure to accommodate the change of engine. All the plumbing had to change, too, along with the gearbox casing, which is longer and narrower for both aerodynamic reasons and to extend the car’s wheelbase to achieve better stability in slow-speed corners.
After pre-season testing Ricciardo alluded to having difficulty under braking, although whether this is something which could be adjusted by a change of materials or setup is hard to divine. But since Ricciardo has a reputation for being the last of the late brakers when overtaking demands it, this potential weakness is one he must address with due urgency.
“I think I was just finding things to talk about,” he says. “What can separate the good from the
“I’M GETTING THERE WITH THE CAR, GETTING UP TO A PRETTY GOOD LEVEL. IT’S BEEN – I DON’T WANT TO SAY EASY, BUT PRETTY SMOOTH SO FAR”
great is just how well you can stop the car and feel what it’s doing. So I guess brakes are talked about just because there’s a lot of lap time in it normally, if you can nail it.
“Generally, I’m getting there with the car, getting up to a pretty good level. It’s been – I don’t want to say easy, but pretty smooth so far. Once you start to try to get that last few percent, that’s what still just takes a little bit of time.
“The positive with that is that as the season goes on, each race will probably get better and better. So that’s a nice thought. But also I don’t want to start, you know, really off it all. It was a pretty smooth start.”
Depending on how the season progresses, other opportunities within the Mclaren portfolio may present themselves. While Ricciardo isn’t planning on doing the full Alonso, and taking a race off to contend the Indy 500, he’s aware the Bathurst 12-hour race doesn’t clash with any GPS and Mclaren has a car eligible to participate in it. Brown has also offered a run in an ex-earnhardt NASCAR if Ricciardo bags a 2021 podium.
“I do have to ask Zak. I need to – even if I don’t do the race – I need to drive a supercar
around Bathurst. Whether it’s a private test, or the actual race, I do need to do it. And I think now I have a good opportunity with Zak as a friend and a boss. He’s keen to try and get us into the other open-wheelers in the States, the Indycars. So there’s a lot to do.
“When I signed with him, over the early phase of last year, we had these conversations and it was thrown in there, ‘We should get you to do the 12 Hours of Bathurst’. If he asked me and it worked logistically, I would say yes.”
Now that Mclaren is enjoying talking about its past once again – celebrating it, in fact – after so many frigid Ron Dennis years in which pre-dennis Mclaren history was deemed to be unspeakably un-good, having one of the team’s F1 drivers compete in a prestigious sportscar event would be a proper callback to history, evoking memories of Bruce Mclaren and Denny Hulme dominating Can-am. Even if Ricciardo views Mclaren’s antipodean links as nice-to-have, rather than essential, it will please the marque’s passionate and committed posse of fans.
And there’s one more thing for Ricciardo to enjoy about his new employ: he can actually drive that 675 LT (upspecced by Mclaren Special Operations, no less) he acquired by stealth six years ago rather than keeping it under wraps.
“I had to be a bit discreet, being in the facility,” he recalls, “because even walking around Automotive, people might talk. Someone might take a photo or say, ‘What’s he doing here?’
“I kind of had to make it very obvious to them that I was buying a Mclaren – which made me sound like a right dick!”
“I NEED TO DRIVE A SUPERCAR AROUND BATHURST. WHETHER IT’S A PRIVATE TEST, OR THE ACTUAL RACE, I DO NEED TO DO IT”