When Daniel Ricciardo arrived at Red Bull Racing in 2014, he was expected to be Sebastian Vettel’s quiet sidekick. He was there, it seemed, to give Red Bull a second driver capable of winning races that would also be willing to stay out of the way of the company’s leading man. Ricciardo beat the reigning four-time world champion head to head that season instead. Seven years later, he finds himself on the wrong end of a similar situation.
This is the thirteenth installment of our driver-by-driver preview of the 2022 Formula 1 season. This weekend, “we will be covering McLaren”. You can find the rest of our previews here.
Ricciardo is a race winner with McLaren, an already-successful relationship that seems to be steady whether or not he is the team’s lead driver. The question is whether or not he can compete for a championship with the team, something that becomes significantly more difficult if he is not regularly competitive with his own teammate.
HOW HE GOT HERE
Daniel Ricciardo, like so many F1 drivers, got to the sport through an optimistic Red Bull Racing farm system that spent the 2010s seemingly churning out as many F1 drivers as possible. Having been in cars since 2005 and highlighting his junior career with a runner-up finish in the, then-crucial Formula Renault 3.5 series in 2010, Red Bull called him up to a mid-season replacement seat at the independent Hispania Racing Team in 2011. A year later, he was at their Scuderia Toro Rosso junior team.
Ricciardo’s two years at Toro Rosso were not particularly notable, but his call-up to Red Bull led to immediate success. He won three races in 2014, enough to finish third in the championship and beat preseason favorite Sebastian Vettel in the championship by 61 points. It led him to a brief leading role at Red Bull while the team was between eras of power, but he lost that title quickly when the team called up Max Verstappen and made their young prospect a clear preference. Ricciardo left for Renault, where he put together two strong seasons highlighted by fifth in the 2020 championship.
But he wanted more, and he felt McLaren offered a better opportunity to get it. So he left Renault, the team where he had been a dominant midpack force for two years, to join the papaya orange crew in 2021. Source: Road and Track