Spanish star seeks hometown success RICCIARDO BACK IN THE FAST LANE
SAT-SUNDAY 11PM
World No. 1 Jon Rahm is the heavy favourite to take out this week’s Spanish Open. The hometown hero has been a marvel on tour this year, and he returns to a course that has served him well in the past. Rahm won in 2018 and 2019, while last year’s event was cancelled due to the pandemic. It’s not the strongest field we’ve seen at an event this year, but that could open the door for Australia’s Min Woo Lee to continue his strong 2021 form. There are plenty of young Europeans to keep an eye on, but Rahm is the man to beat.
THE past two races have changed everything for Daniel Ricciardo. All of a sudden, the Aussie larrikin who is everyone’s best mate in the Formula One paddock is goofing around again, drinking grog from his shoes, and making frenemies.
That’s a good thing because it means he’s driving fast and is a threat again.
He wasn’t in the first half of the year when he struggled to make any impact in his first season with McLaren, routinely finishing behind his younger teammate Lando Norris both in qualifying and in races.
Normally the life of the party, the Honey Badger’s mood and body language was telling. He wasn’t having fun. He wasn’t going quick.
And the rumour mill was going into overdrive.
The gossip during the past three years after he walked out on Red Bull, firstly to join Renault, then McLaren, was whether he had made the dumbest mistake of his career.
The whispers early on this year was whether he was on the slide, which can be fatal in a ruthless sport where doors open and close in the blink of an eye.
That was before the past two races. Now the question on everyone’s lips is whether Ricciardo has outsmarted all the doubters and got himself in the right seat at the right time.
We won’t know that until 2022, when the new regulations come into place that are designed to make the championship more competitive after Mercedes’ seven years (and continuing) domination.
It doesn’t matter how good a driver anyone is – and Ricciardo is as skilled as anyone on the grid. You can’t win in Formula One unless you have the right car, and often that means figuring out where the next championship car is before everyone else does.
Time will tell, but all the signs right now are brighter than ever for Ricciardo after he provided McLaren with its first grand prix win in almost a decade when he pulled off a stunning victory in Italy last month. But was it just a fluke because Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen collided and failed to finish the race?
Evidently not because Norris joined him on the podium after finishing second, then backed it up by taking pole position for the next race in Russia.
Norris really should have won in Sochi, but gambled and lost three laps from the checkered flag when the rain started to pelt down and he elected not to switch to wet-weather tyres with Hamilton closing in. Ricciardo finished fourth. It was a harsh lesson for the team, but losing the battle might lead to winning the war because the biggest takeaway is that the mighty McLaren is back and building momentum, with this weekend’s Turkish Grand Prix the next big indicator of where the team is at.
Ricciardo is supremely confident things are heading in the right direction. “We’ve been working hard since the last race to make sure we hit the ground running,” he said.
“Given we only went back there last year, we don’t have a huge amount of data on how best to set the car up, so we’ve been doing work in the sim to learn a bit more and allow us to start strong,” he said.
“We’re doing everything we can to outscore our competitors at every weekend.
“We’ve had a good start to the second half of the season, so we head to Turkey looking to retain and build on that momentum as we approach the final third of
the season.”