‘Bring out the old me’: Daniel Ricciardo opens up on negative spiral, teammate tensions and how he knew he wasn’t finished

Daniel Ricciardo saw first hand what a heartfelt farewell looked like, and decided he wanted absolutely no part of it.

It was the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix of 2022, and as Formula 1’s teams and drivers came together to celebrate the retirement of four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel, Ricciardo’s thoughts were elsewhere.

Sacked by McLaren midway through the season and with no race seat for 2023, that night at Yas Marina could have been Ricciardo’s last dance, too. It was a prospect that perturbed him.

“Seb got the big goodbye he completely deserved, but I didn’t know at that stage if 2022 was the end or not for me too,” Ricciardo says in an exclusive interview ahead of his return to Albert Park this weekend.

“At that moment it wasn’t something I cared too much about, mostly because I didn’t like the way my career had ended if that was it.

Daniel Ricciardo’s love for F1 has returned.Credit: Getty Images

“It didn’t bother me I didn’t get the send-off Seb did, because deep down I didn’t think I was done. I still believed I could change it, I just needed a chance to.”

That chance, unexpectedly, came in late July last year when Ricciardo was parachuted into Red Bull’s second team, then known as AlphaTauri, after serving as Red Bull Racing’s reserve driver for the first half of 2023. It was a chance that set the wheels in motion for a return to this weekend’s Australian Grand Prix with the team now succinctly known as RB.

And it was a chance to employ a new approach to jump-start a career that from its 2011 beginnings, saw Ricciardo morph from the sport’s grinning young gun to a genuine top-liner to a driver who split with McLaren because of a paucity of results.

Ricciardo has had a slow start to the 2024 season, with finishes of 13th and 16th, and his second career act clearly won’t be as long as his first.

He’s 35 in July, and shakes his head when reminded that his memorable Albert Park “podium” that wasn’t – when he crossed the line in second place before his car was excluded for a regulatory breach – was 10 years ago. Given a lifeline with a team that spent much of 2023 anchored to the bottom of the F1 constructors’ championship, there’s no guarantee of even moderate success for the eight-time grand prix winner. What the Australian can control, though, is how he approaches the task.

Being away from the grid for the first half of last year made him realise how suffocating the negative spiral he’d been unable to escape truly was as his McLaren tenure ended with a whimper.

“From that mid-point of 2022 when I basically didn’t have a job and was unsure what I was going to do, I was almost wishing the races away, wanting the season to be done with,” he admits.

“I found it hard to be very present in that time. I had to fight to actually enjoy the job.

“Coming back last year, I found that I wasn’t thinking about anything else because I was truly happy doing what I was doing. I was in love with the sport again, with driving and competing. In 2022, I struggled with that and just wanted it to be over.”

Being away from the grid in early 2023, holed up on his farm in the south of Western Australia, made Ricciardo realise just how thinly he’d been spreading himself.

“It’s had a long-lasting impact. I got my energy and my excitement back by pushing a few things to the side, cutting out a lot of clutter.

”I wanted to be able to fall back in love with training again, but to train and to train well, you need to get some time back in your life to do that properly. You can’t do a million other things, because you have no window to train, and then maybe you’re not as strong or as healthy or as fresh as you should be, and it spirals.

“I wanted to get that feeling back again, to bring out the old me. Racing and training are my priorities right now, and all of the other stuff is secondary.”

Ricciardo’s seven-race comeback for AlphaTauri last season hit only occasional heights – a stunning fourth on the grid in Mexico in what was the field’s slowest car was a reminder of the talent that lurked within, but a five-race lay-off with a broken hand made for an inconclusive report card. His leadership blossomed.

Ricciardo isn’t one to thump tables when things go awry, berate his engineers over the radio, chastise the team in public. His preference is for calm feedback, positive body language, a fist bump here and an arm around a shoulder there.

He’ll tick over 250 grands prix this season and will end 2024 as one of the 10 most experienced drivers ever.

”I’ve been in F1 a long time, driven a lot of cars, seen a lot of things. My knowledge … I probably underestimated that,” he says. “The team was struggling a bit at the time, and I could see that my experience was helping. The way the team responded to what I had to say, the questions they asked … I grew to really enjoy that aspect of it.

“You realise with age that you have the power to change how a garage feels, how a team responds. There’s hundreds of people that work with these teams, but you’re one of two people who the world watches to see how the team performs. We don’t just drive the car, we have the ability to alter the atmosphere in the room and that’s something I’m definitely more aware of.”

During the off-season Ricciardo launched himself into his training like he’d done a decade earlier. Working without a dedicated personal trainer for the first time since his pre-F1 days – Finnish performance coach Pyry Salmela supports Ricciardo at the track, but not outside of it – he attacked his pre-season with purpose, reporting to work in his best shape since his mid-20s.

Tossed a career lifeline, Ricciardo doesn’t want to look back and wonder if he’d prepared well enough when the time eventually comes for him to leave the sport on his own terms, and – this time – for good.

“I didn’t need to eat a heap of food or take time off over summer – it’s probably the most training I’ve done in December in my life,” he laughs.

“Maybe it’s my age these days, but I just don’t have the desire to completely let go any more because you definitely don’t bounce back as quickly at 34 as you do 24.”

Ricciardo, Tsunoda and the Red Bull prize

Ricciardo came back to F1 with AlphaTauri last year, officially at least, to replace Dutchman Nyck De Vries, who was sacked after 10 races in which he failed to finish better than 12th place.

Unofficially, the Australian was brought back by Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner to assess what he had left, and to see if he could be a solution to a rare on-track problem for the reigning world champions, should it persist.

Where Max Verstappen swept all before him last year, teammate Sergio Perez struggled after the pair traded victories over the first four races of the season. From there, Verstappen won 17 more times, doubled Perez’s points tally (575-285), and could have won the F1 constructors’ championship by himself.

Ricciardo with Max Verstappen (left) and Sergio Perez in a Red Bull team photo.Credit: Getty Images

Red Bull Racing brass have said the seat is Perez’s to lose, but a similar swoon to 2023 in what is the final season of a two-year contract might see the team look elsewhere – and Ricciardo has made no secret of his desire to return to the squad he drove for from 2014-18.

“Jumping back in with the Red Bull family, that’s the dream – to end my career as a Red Bull driver would be perfect,” he said at the end of 2023.

“I’m not looking at the end … but if I did get back there, I’d make sure I finished there.”

Ricciardo’s muted early season start, combined with Perez’s pair of second places – to Verstappen – in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia before the Australian Grand Prix doesn’t help his cause, with Red Bull’s RB20 machine looking even more imperious than the car that won 21 of 22 grands prix a year ago.

Within his own midfield RB team, Ricciardo’s teammate Yuki Tsunoda has out-qualified the Australian in the opening two races, and finished ahead in Saudi Arabia after Ricciardo fell to the back of the field following a botched pit stop that lost him 40 seconds to the rest of the pack.

With Tsunoda also looking to impress in case Perez falters, tensions between the RB teammates were inevitable; after reluctantly ceding to a team order to let a quicker Ricciardo past in the latter stages of the Bahrain Grand Prix, Tsunoda dangerously swerved at Ricciardo after the chequered flag, Ricciardo criticising the Japanese driver’s “immaturity” before taking a longer-term view to call for calm.

“Where I’m at in my career and probably just my age … no one’s going to benefit from us having a rivalry or attention or anything like this from race one of a long season,” Ricciardo said of the 23-year-old Japanese driver.

“Especially when the team has new personnel. Everyone’s trying to pick each other up and build themselves and the confidence, we need to help them do that as well.

“What happened at the end of the race wasn’t great, but two hours later we walked out of a meeting [and] actually put the team in a better place than it was.”

Freelance journalist Matthew Clayton has been covering F1 for 25 years for several outlets, including redbull.com.

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