DANIEL RICCIARDO
Renault-bound Daniel Ricciardo opens up to F1 Racing about the highs and lows of life with Red Bull – the team that made him
Renault-bound ace runs through his decade with Red Bull
REGRETS – HE MIGHT HAVE A FEW.
But as Daniel Ricciardo draws back his lips in that famously broad 1,000-watt grin, it’s clear that (in public at least) he won’t be sharing any private misgivings about his departure from Red Bull. Moving teams is a significant point in any driver’s career, but when that migration takes them away from a junior programme that’s nurtured them virtually since the racing cradle, it’s a huge turning point. In the past decade, only Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel have done it willingly.
As part of the Red Bull machine Daniel has done his growing up in public, evolving from wannabe to ferocious competitor, race winner and, arguably, Formula 1’s preeminent overtaker. During that time, many of his Red Bull Junior Team peers have failed to make the grade – and have been ushered towards the exit mercilessly and without ceremony. It’s been quite a journey, and
F1 Racing has assembled several photographs to focus Daniel’s attention on the key moments in his development. Not that he’s taking this entirely seriously.
“Journey?” he giggles. “When I hear that I think of the song: Don’t stop belieeeeving, hold on to the feeeeling…”
It’s fair to say that Dan’s racing career encompasses consistently more high notes than his singing voice, and the listening public can feel relieved that he’s found a path that better suits his talents. But it’s at moments such as this that you recall times past, during his first seasons in F1, when his frivolity sat uncomfortably with many of the sport’s power brokers. Such lack of seriousness, they felt, was inherently career-limiting.
“Oh, but I was taken seriously.” he counters. “Red Bull took me seriously. Outside, people who didn’t know me would just see the smile, the laugh, and at that point I hadn’t really had any big on-track battles that created statements. They knew I was a fast driver but probably without the killer instinct to run at the top. But that was another thing, deep down, that I knew I had. I had it all through my career, from karting onwards. For whatever reason, I think in F1 it took time to come out. When I first joined F1 I think I was probably a little overwhelmed.”
That chimes with the thoughts of his friend and Red Bull Junior Team contemporary Brendon Hartley, with
“PEOPLE KNEW I WAS A FAST DRIVER BUT PROBABLY WITHOUT THE KILLER INSTINCT TO RUN AT THE TOP. BUT THAT WAS ANOTHER THING, DEEP DOWN, THAT I KNEW I HAD”
whom Daniel shared test and reserve driver duties for Red Bull and Toro Rosso in 2010 until Hartley was axed from the programme mid-season. Hartley describes that era as “A dark period where I lost confidence. I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t performing well.”
Viewed in black and white, Daniel’s results in the junior formulae were solid rather than spectacular, although his British Formula 3 title came before that series went into terminal decline. From trackside, though, he was always eye-catching – sufficiently so to spark the interest of Helmut Marko, Red Bull’s driver advisor, mentor, and chief Junior Team axeman. It was Marko who signed Daniel and then spared him the chop as others – Jaime Alguersuari, Sébastien Buemi, Jeaneric Vergne, et al – fell out of favour. Alongside Red Bull team principal Christian Horner and race engineer Simon Rennie, Marko is a key figure in Daniel’s career.
“I guess he’s been the day-one homey, as I say,” Daniel reflects. “Back in Estoril in 2007, it was 2 November or 2 December – one or the other – he was there to help me sign that deal.” In those days, Red Bull ran an annual
assessment shoot-out at Estoril for drivers hoping to join the Junior Team. The top two or three would get Red Bull backing, a budget for the following season, and the installation of Marko as career shepherd.
“The big thing for him, and he still talks about it – which makes me smile – is, ‘I remember that first day in Estoril you came sideways in braking.’ He talks about my driving style with passion. I respect Helmut because he’s a racer and, like it or not, he will always be transparent. Especially in the early days, that made me develop as a man. Maybe some harsh phone calls at the time didn’t seem like they were helping, but for sure they did.”
We take it for granted now that when Daniel graduated to Red Bull’s senior team in ’14, filling the vacancy left by a disgruntled Mark Webber, he saw off established favourite Sebastian Vettel – to the extent Vettel flounced off to Ferrari come season’s end. But at the start of that year it was Daniel who was under pressure. He admits now that he knew the season would be “super important”. Red Bull had won four title doubles on the bounce with Vettel, who was very much top dog at the team, but their first hybrid-era chassis was rather pedestrian and Renault’s engine was well off the pace. It wasn’t until Canada that Mercedes’ dominance cracked: both cars suffered identical MGU-K failures that cost power and placed additional stress on the brakes, putting Lewis Hamilton out and leaving Nico Rosberg guarding a wafer-thin lead. Daniel sailed by on the penultimate lap.
“I use the word ‘relief’ because you believe you can do something, but until you do it you don’t actually really know if you can,” he says, resting a finger on the image of himself atop the podium. “I remember as soon as I passed Rosberg, I passed him on the last chicane, then I was going round Turns 1 and 2, and I remember thinking: ‘I hope my hands still work, I hope I can still change gears, I hope I just don’t freeze.’”
Although this, plus two other victories, boosted his standing within the F1 paddock and hastened Vettel’s decision to depart for pastures new, Daniel’s results trajectory didn’t take the form of an uninterrupted upward curve. Over successive seasons Red Bull have continued to be sporadic in form, and the Renault power unit has formed but a small part of the malaise.
In ’15 he didn’t win a single race; in ’16 he won just one – the team squandered another, in Monaco, by botching a pitstop – and in ’17 Red Bull didn’t have a good enough car to compete for podiums until the European season. Daniel’s win in Baku, his only victory that year, came about through fortuitous circumstances. This season he started strongly with two opportunistic wins in China
and Monaco and thus considered himself an outside title contender, until his “cursed” RB14 began breaking down again with frustrating regularity. Suffice to say his Red Bull career hasn’t evolved as he expected.
“It’s funny,” he recalls. “In 2014 in Singapore I saw Jackie Stewart in the hotel and he said something to me that I didn’t understand at the time. It was along the lines of, ‘It might get harder now because you’ve achieved this success, this momentum, but it’s important to stay on top of it. You will get a lot of other things happening.’ He kind of suggested it’s even harder to stay at the top once you’ve got there. And he said if you ever want to talk, need some guidance, let me know. I obviously respected him coming up to me and saying that, but I didn’t get it at the time because I was with a big team, I’d won three races already and I thought, ‘This shit’s easy, what are you taking about? It’s only going to get easier. If I can do it against Seb, I can do it against anyone.’
“I came to understand his point in 2015 though. It doesn’t always go your way. I think dealing with the expectation, that was the toughest. I thought I was going to be the world champion in 2015. That’s why, since then, I haven’t really liked the word ‘expectation’. Let’s be a bit more chilled about it and take things as they come.”
While the victories have been rarer than he’d prefer, Daniel has eked out a reputation as one of F1’s foremost exponents of the art of overtaking. Not breezing-by-withdrs passing, but good old-fashioned feel for the nuances of grip in the braking zone. Few other drivers within F1 have the same uncanny grasp of the delicate equilibrium between tormented Pirelli and fractious asphalt.
“It comes with confidence,” he explains. “I guess I’ve always been a very sensitive driver. Braking is a lot of feeling. You have to feel the limit when you are about to lock, and modulate the brake. And having that feeling gave me confidence going late. I believe a lot of people saw me as a soft touch when I came to F1. I knew I wasn’t and I wanted to prove those people wrong. I wanted to stick the middle finger up at them and say ‘I can do this, and I can do it very well.’ I wanted to be recognised for it.
“There were a lot of times growing up where I left a race on Sunday and I left with regrets, because I was like ‘If only I had gone for that move on lap five it would have changed my race.’ I hesitated a lot as a kid, but the few times when I did pull the trigger it always worked out for me. When I got to F1 with a top team I figured I’m not doing it justice if I don’t pull the trigger. I’d become comfortable with the fact that I might crash, but I’m better off crashing than not trying. Once I became comfortable with that it became a lot easier.”
“A LOT OF PEOPLE SAW ME AS A SOFT TOUCH WHEN I CAME TO F1. I KNEW I WASN’T AND I WANTED TO PROVE THEM WRONG. I WANTED TO SAY ‘I CAN DO THIS, AND I CAN DO IT VERY WELL’”
For all that this past season has been a tapestry of disappointment and unfulfilled promise, Daniel cannot expect an immediate upswing when he dons the yellow and black. When Renault acquired ‘Team Enstone’ at the end of ’15 they set a three-year target to return to winning form. That timescale has since been revised as the magnitude of the task became apparent, and Renault now view the major rule changes coming in 2021 as the key to joining the ‘big three’; for Daniel that could mean two seasons on the fringes, scrapping to get into Q3 and regarding podiums as a distant hope.
For some of Daniel’s rivals, that may be welcome. His signature podium celebration of quaffing champagne from a race boot proved such a hit in ’17 that the Formula One Group filed a trademark application for the term ‘Shoey’. But while celebrity guests such as Sir Patrick Stewart and Gerard Butler gamely stepped forward to ‘shoot the boot’, others – notably Valtteri Bottas in Austria in ’17 – eschewed the shoe.
“Yeah,” says Daniel with a rueful shake of the head, “what a pussy…”