Daniel Ricciardo: why 2022 is most important year in his career

why 2022 is the most important year in Ricciardo's career

You would never have believed this time last year that we’d be talking about a potential derailment of Daniel Ricciardo’s career.

But after racing for four teams over the past 12 years in the sport, the 32-year-old may have found his match.

Source: YouTube/McLaren

After spending two years at Renault, where his podium aspirations were left unfulfilled, the Aussie was brought to McLaren to lead the team into its next title-winning era.

Lando Norris, then just 21 years old and embarking on his third year in F1, was to be his junior teammate.

Source: YouTube/McLaren

But the Briton dominated Ricciardo, finishing ahead of him in all but five of the 19 races they both finished last year.

I don’t want to be mean, but I don’t have sympathy. At the end of the day it was his decision to come to McLaren — it is the decision of any driver to go to a different team — and it is up to him to do a good job.

Source: YouTube/McLaren A severely one-sided first half of the season cast the die. Norris was no longer the young driver or McLaren junior; he’d become the team leader with no need for a senior partner.

Source: YouTube/McLaren It’s been well canvassed how ill-suited Ricciardo’s driving style was to the peculiar MCL35M, a car that had reached the end of its development cycle under the old regulations.

At the moment the car isn’t quite coming to me. I bumped into Carlos [Sainz, former McLaren driver] not too long ago. He was like, ‘What do you think? Strange, huh?’ And I was like, ‘Thanks for telling me!’.

“ — Daniel Ricciardo

Ricciardo improved over the year, but never enough to close the gap to Norris, finishing 45 points behind the Briton despite a merited victory in Italy.

Ricciardo no doubt will have been pleased to see the back of 2021. During the break he had the opportunity to visit his family in Perth for the first time since 2020.

There’s optimism he can start with a clean slate in 2022 thanks to the all-new technical rules, which should mean the DNA of the previous unwieldy machine will be banished to the previous era. Credit: YouTube/McLaren

From very early on, from when I first got in the car, I was relaying information about ‘this is what’s different compared to the Renault, the Red Bull’, so I was already kind of feeding information.

“ — Daniel Ricciardo

Ricciardo has only this season to prove his worth. The cold, hard truth is that with Lando Norris in full flight, McLaren doesn’t need Ricciardo operating at less than 100 per cent of his potential.

Words: Michael Lamonato Producer: Stefan Centofanti Learn more