Ricciardo opens up on his McLaren departure: “I didn't care anymore”

A victory in the 2021 Italian Grand Prix aside, Ricciardo constantly fought to find the right setup, balance, and comfort with the car that ultimately never came, despite the hours of toil from both team and driver. The decision to terminate his contract with a year remaining was a painful one on both sides.

"It's never the way you want to end something," said Ricciardo, in an interview with this writer. "Obviously, the results weren't there.

"I'm a pretty easy-going guy, I got on with the team, and I didn't fall out with anyone in the team, but it's all performance-based and, let's say, the business side of it didn't work out.

"At the time, it was a bit of a harsh reality getting fired. but by the end of the season, when I got home for Christmas, I was like, 'Okay, it probably doesn't help my reputation', but at that point, I didn't care anymore. It was a blessing in disguise.

"I needed to step away for a bit, to re-find myself, re-find my love for the sport. If it could have been done in a better way, fine, but at the same time, I don't think me finishing out the contract this year would have done me any favours.

"I guess, in a way, I thank them for making that decision because we were in a bit of a hole, and I'm not sure we could have got out of it."

Ricciardo was so disenchanted at the time that he spurned opportunities to drive for Haas and Williams for this season, both of whom were willing to take a gamble on the 34-year-old Australian.

Instead, Ricciardo accepted an offer from Red Bull to serve as its third driver, underpinning the work of main drivers Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez, by partaking in test and simulator sessions, as well as assisting the team with its commercial activities.

The beaming smile so long his trademark, and which had disappeared during his McLaren days, was back in evidence upon his return to a team where he was at his happiest from 2014-18, during which time he won seven of his eight grands prix.

Ricciardo credits one person at the time – Red Bull team principal Christian Horner – for still believing in him.

"In terms of what I felt coming back into the [Red Bull] family, his investment in me, his interest, the open arms, I feel he's been a really big supporter," said Ricciardo. "He really wanted me to get back to a level he knows I'm capable of.

"A lot of people probably lost a little bit of faith in me over the last couple of years, but I felt like the things he was doing to make me comfortable, setting me up with (his old race engineer) Simon (Rennie), he still believes I can do it, and he just wants to see it."

Ricciardo, though, still took his time over the winter to rediscover not only himself but also his love for F1.

It was his intention to "eat, drink with mates, have fun, and just try to live a normal life". Training went out of the window.

"I wasn't going stupid, but I was having beers with friends, camping, fishing, doing these kinds of things," said Ricciardo.

"Then it got to the end of January, I've probably done two months of just holidays, and I was starting to be like, 'Okay, I don't really want to fall into this, having a beer every day, having fun'. I didn't feel I was at that point, that I didn't want to become a bit of a slob."

It wasn’t until a visit to the Super Bowl in Arizona in mid-February, and feeling that buzz of being at a major sporting event, that Ricciardo's enthusiasm started to return, sparking his desire to return to training in earnest.

That first visit to the Red Bull simulator, however, brought home just where it had all gone wrong at McLaren. Horner concedes the driver who returned to Red Bull was effectively 'broken' in comparison to the one who left at the end of 2018 to join Renault.

“We’ve spent the last months rebuilding him and getting the old Daniel back that we recognised from when he was last with us,” said Horner.

“He had picked up a lot of bad habits. It took some of his old engineering team to unpick some of those and very quickly, and in a virtual world, get him back on a par with what we were used to.”

Specifically, Horner said Ricciardo's braking technique “had changed dramatically”, and that "he was trying to put a sticking plaster on a weakness of the [McLaren] car. Once we sorted that, then everything started to become more natural.”

Ricciardo concedes "it took a while to get going" on the sim, not least as he "was also pretty nervous because it was like walking back into time going back to the factory".

He added: "I wasn't sure how I was going to be received, whether people would be rolling their eyes and saying I was the kid that left them five years ago. You never really know, but it was a lot nicer than I thought.

"With the driving, it took a little while for me to unplug a few things. I would say the second time in the sim, I then started to improve and I felt my confidence coming back. I would see Simon smiling at me, and we would start to joke a little bit, so I was like, 'Okay, I can do this'."

Those early days back at Red Bull were eye-opening for Ricciardo who was able to appreciate that his two failed years at McLaren were not all his fault.

"I genuinely do feel that I lost some of my technique, some of my strengths," said Ricciardo. "It felt like when things weren't working I had to throw them away, and then I'd try some other stuff but that wouldn't work, then my confidence would go down.

"I had thoughts that maybe I just couldn't do it anymore. Period! A lot of stuff got lost along the way, and when I got back into the Red Bull sim, I realised I was not a very confident person. In a way that was a relief for me, to see that I wasn't operating at the level I thought. It kind of justified some of my performances.

"It's not making excuses because those performances weren't good, but it was clear to me that it wasn't me operating at 100%. Yes, I should have been able to figure it out. I couldn't, but it was a kind of closure for me that I had got a bit lost but I could rediscover things and get back to being me."

In July, two days after the British Grand Prix, it took just 11 laps of a tyre test with Pirelli for Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko to make the call that Ricciardo was ready for an F1 return. Marko axed Nyck de Vries just ten races into his rookie season, with Ricciardo handed the second seat at AlphaTauri alongside Yuki Tsunoda.

Ricciardo's years of experience shone through on his return to the Faenza-based team, with whom he spent two years in 2012 and 2013 prior to being promoted to Red Bull, and he drove admirably in the final two grands prix prior to the summer break in Hungary and Belgium.

In practice for the third race of his return in the Netherlands, however, the brakes were put on his comeback when he suffered a multiple break of the small finger metatarsal in his left hand after steering into a barrier to avoid hitting compatriot Oscar Piastri who, moments earlier, had crashed his McLaren.

Although the past few weeks looking on again from the sidelines will have been tough for Ricciardo, they will have been tempered by the fact he has a guaranteed seat with AlphaTauri for next season. It means he now has the platform he craves in his bid for a second promotion to Red Bull for 2025 when there will be a free seat available as Perez's current deal expires at the end of next year.

"I told Christian, 'Look, now that I'm back in the family, I feel so much happier and like myself that I don't want to leave'," said Ricciardo.

"The big picture is that I would love to get back to the top team. If it means next year I'm working my way back up, that's also exciting."

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.