There’s so much more to winning in Formula 1 than just talent.
The annals of F1 history are replete with championship-calibre drivers who never got a sniff at the title. Some never even got a chance to win races.
Success in motorsport’s top series relies on a confluence of factors. Perhaps the biggest one is timing.
Just ask Fernando Alonso, modern F1’s prototypical example. Almost universally regarded as the best of his generation, he has just two championships to his name thanks to a series of catastrophically poor career decisions.
To be fair to him — and to pretty much every driver who’s fallen into the same trap — they all seemed logical at the time. Hindsight is 20/20.
As it stands, Daniel Ricciardo’s career looks at risk of having capitulated to the same random influences.
Ricciardo’s F1 debut was understated relative to the formidable force he became in his early years at Red Bull Racing, where his swashbuckling racing style earnt him a reputation as a future world champion.
Ensconced inside a team that was still fresh off four successive titles, it seemed like a realistic forecast.
But you know how the rest of the story goes. He’s now back with Red Bull Racing but on the sidelines and considering routes back into a race-winning seat.
He says his fairytale scenario for the final years of his career is to compete again for Red Bull Racing.
And you can understand why. It’s not just that RBR is the sport’s dominant constructor. Ricciardo has unfinished business at a team we all thought would make him a champion.
RED BULL RACING’S VICTORY STREAK
Red Bull Racing has a formidable victory record in Formula 1. Despite having debuted in 2005, less than 20 years ago, the team is already the fifth most successful constructor by number of wins, behind only Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes and Williams.
If you exclude teams with fewer than 100 grands prix entries, it’s the second most successful team by wins as a percentage, having won 28.4 per cent of its races.
But the strike rate is even more remarkable if you consider the period since the team’s first victory in 2009, given its formative seasons were spent building up the former Stewart and Jaguar team into the winning constructor we know today.
The team has barely stopped winning since that maiden triumph at the Chinese Grand Prix in 2009.
The following data compiled for the Red Bull website demonstrates the regularity with which the team has been able to rack up victories, calculating how many races it took to reach successive 10-win milestones.
Red Bull Racing’s first 100 wins
Wins 1–10 (China 2009 to Europe 2010): 23 races
Wins 10–20 (Europe 2010 to Monaco 2011): 16 races
Wins 20–30 (Monaco 2011 to Great Britain 2012): 22 races
Wins 30–40 (Britain 2012 to Italy 2013): 23 races
Wins 40–50 (Italy 2013 to Belgium 2014): 19 races
Wins 50–60 (Belgium 2014 to Austria 2019): 97 races
Wins 60–70 (Austria 2019 to Austria 2021): 38 races
Wins 70–80 (Austria 2021 to Monaco 2022): 20 races
Wins 80–90 (Monaco 2022 to USA 2022): 12 races
Wins 90–100 (USA 2022 to Canada 2023): 11 races
The team’s 101st win came at the weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix.
It’s a remarkable set of numbers, demonstrating a formidable strike rate of 35.8 per cent from its first win in 2009 to is latest in Austria.
That’s still less than Mercedes’s almost unbelievable 44.6 per cent record, but you’ll notice one glaring entry of numbers above dragging down that average.
Red Bull has been accumulating on average one win every 2.79 races since 2009.
But it took the team 97 races to claim wins 50 to 60 between 2014 and 2019 — that is, a victory for every 9.1 races.
Daniel Ricciardo’s first Red Bull Racing career spanned 2014 to 2018.
Unfortunately for him, this happened to be the least competitive post-championship era of the soon-to-be six-time constructors champion.
In fact during the 100 grands prix Ricciardo raced for the team RBR achieved just nine victories — a 9 per cent hit rate, or a win every 11 races.
If you were to exclude from the record the years Daniel was at Red Bull Racing, the team’s strike rate would rise to a ridiculous 50 per cent — one win for every two races.
TIMING IS EVERYTHING
Ricciardo’s timing could not have been worse.
He arrived at Red Bull Racing in time for a set of regulation changes that snookered its previous performance advantages. He left it after two dire seasons of chronic unreliability that had many wondering whether the team could ever hope to overcome the Mercedes juggernaut.
But Ricciardo departed as Honda arrived, and the Japanese constructor was just starting to pull itself together after a deeply humiliating first few seasons back in the sport.
The team also capitalised on some regulation tweaks in 2019 and 2021 to make larger than expected strides towards the front that culminated in the ferocious championship battle with Mercedes two years ago.
It’s now the dominant constructor in Formula 1 gunning to break some long-held records previously thought untouchable.
Verstappen’s victory in Austria brings him to five successive wins. Four more will see him equal the record of nine, currently held by Sebastian Vettel, the previous marker of Red Bull Racing domination.
Winning the British Grand Prix will also see Red Bull Racing equal the record for most successive wins by a team, having been set at 11 by McLaren in 1988, though that run includes last year’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
And then of course we have the almost unimaginable prospect of the first victory clean sweep in Formula 1 history. That 1988 McLaren team got close but for one catastrophic race — the Italian Grand Prix, where Alain Prost retired with engine problems and Ayrton Senna was hit by a lapped car. It’ll take a similarly significant chunk of bad luck to derail RBR this season.
Ricciardo will be able to claim a small part of this success as the team’s reserve driver given he’s active in the simulator, but we all know he has the talent and the capacity to be doing the business in the car as a headliner.
If his first RBR carer hadn’t happened to have exactly coincided with the team’s worst run of form since its first win, he way well have been.
So you can understand why his fairytale career-ending scenario is to get behind the wheel at Red Bull Racing again.
But timing is everything in Formula 1, and so far it hasn’t been on his side.
