Daniel Ricciardo isn’t making his Formula 1 comeback at AlphaTauri just to race at AlphaTauri.
The eight-time race winner has been explicit about his considerably loftier aim.
“Honestly, the fairytale ending [would be] to finish my career [at Red Bull Racing] if I could have it all my own way,” he told ESPN before his move to AlphaTauri was confirmed. “I’ll probably have to work my way up a little bit, but it’s really nice to be back here.”
The route there takes him back to his roots at the AlphaTauri team, formerly Toro Rosso.
It’s a similar path to the one he took to establish himself in F1 in the first place, having joined the junior team in 2012 after a half-season with the now defunct HRT.
His timing then was impeccable. Mark Webber retired 24 months later, in which time Ricciardo was able to prove himself worthy of promotion.
The parallels aren’t lost on Ricciardo the second time around.
“At the start of the year going back to the Red Bull family felt like full circle,” he told the F1 website. “Now going back to AlphaTauri, which was once Toro Rosso, is all very full circle.
“It feels a bit like back when I was working my way out through the Red Bull family: ‘If you get results, we’ll keep pushing you, we’ll keep pushing you’. That’s really the mindset.
“I understand this is my journey back. This is the process and the path, and I’m ready to embrace it.”
Ricciardo will be hoping those parallels extend to history repeating itself with another promotion to the senior team.
Formula 1 would be excited to see the popular Aussie back in a race-winning car. Certainly Australia would get around it too.
But this entire experiment begs the question: if Ricciardo is so keen to get back into Red Bull Racing, why did he leave in the first place, and what’s been the point of the last four and a half years?
THE DECISION TO LEAVE
To understand how his Red Bull sequel differs from the original, it’s worth considering the reasons he left Red Bull Racing in the first place.
Undelivered performance
Ricciardo arrived at Red Bull Racing in 2014 fresh off the team’s fourth successive constructors championship and alongside four-time reigning champion Sebastian Vettel.
He comfortably eclipsed Vettel by the end of the season, taking the first three wins of his career and finishing third in the drivers championship, best of the rest behind Mercedes teammates Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg.
But third turned out to be the most he could aim for during his five years with the team. Red Bull Racing couldn’t pull together a competitive package in the early years of the turbo-hybrid era, in large part thanks to engine supplier Renault’s struggles with the power unit formula.
In fact things got worse the longer Ricciardo stuck around. He collected only four more wins in total, and in 2017 and 2018 he watched as Ferrari took the baton as Mercedes closest challenger, spearheaded by former teammate Vettel.
There were also constant reliability issues that made 2018 particularly frustrating. Red Bull Racing’s solution was to switch to Honda power for 2019 — it turned out to be an inspired move, but at the time the Japanese company’s reputation was still marred by its catastrophic partnership with McLaren.
Max Verstappen’s emergence as a frontrunner
Max Verstappen had been promoted to Red Bull Racing with great fanfare part of the way through 2016 and won his first race. He’d got the benefit of a better strategy, but it was the first moment the Dutchman began to bend the team to his will.
His 2017 campaign nabbed him two victories among a string of clumsy crashes and controversial racing incidents, but his speed was unquestionable — and improving inexorably. By 2018 he was increasingly at least a match for Ricciardo on pure pace and was becoming the superstar Red Bull had hoped he would turn out to be.
Suddenly Ricciardo’s chance to lead the team to its next title had a challenger.
“[I] think that he sees Max growing and growing in terms of speed and strength and he doesn‘t want to play a support role — for want of a better word, because it’s not that they are treated in any way different,” team principal Christian Horner told Beyond the Grid. “I can’t help but feel that was a large part of Daniel’s decision making.”
The implication is that Ricciardo was running from a fight. Ricciardo denied the charge, but Verstappen was undoubtedly a key part of the equation.
Daniel Ricciardo’s position in the team is disputed
If it wasn’t the Dutchman’s outright speed, it was his status in the team that played a pivotal role.
In 2017 Verstappen was offered a contract extension to “build the team around him” along with a reported salary that far outweighed the terms Ricciardo has secured as team leader during the previous negotiation cycle.
Red Bull countered that Ricciardo was later offered identical terms to convince him to stay. But the seed had been planted.
Among the many elements that nurtured that seed into the decision to leave was the infamous Azerbaijan Grand Prix crash with the Dutchman. Verstappen had moved in the braking zone, but both drivers were forced to apologise to the team back at the factory and publicly accept equal blame.
It had echoes of Webber’s treatment alongside Vettel — never unequal opportunities but often a suspected emotional preference for the rising star.
ESPN has even reported Red Bull adviser Helmut Marko explicitly told Ricciardo and his management his preference was to win the 2019 and 2020 titles with Verstappen during Ricciardo’s contract negotiations.
Meanwhile Ricciardo’s popularity was soaring at a time the sport was beginning to gain traction among a greater audience. He was a bankable star able to negotiate the kinds of contract and endorsement deals reserved for only F1’s biggest names.
It was time for him to spread his wings and make a name for himself on his own terms.
His stint at Renault was a qualified success. His time at McLaren was bleak. He’s now back at the Red Bull family — but it would be wrong to say he’s the same driver who left in 2018.
WHY THOSE PROBLEMS NO LONGER MATTER
On the first matter, Red Bull Racing’s competitiveness is obviously a non-issue. Whereas RBR’s long-term success was unclear in 2018, today the team looks set for a lengthy spell at the top of the sport.
The resolutions for the other issues are more interesting.
Ricciardo arrives home as a better driver
It’s true that Ricciardo still needs to shake off his poor two seasons at McLaren, but Red Bull is convinced by his simulator work and last week’s tyre test that the pace is there.
And it should be, because Ricciardo won’t have stopped developing as a driver after leaving Red Bull Racing in 2018.
His Renault years point to some important growth.
His first year with the French team was difficult. The car was uncompetitive, and he had some early struggles adjusting to a machine that was less competitive than the one he’d just jumped out of.
But he was exerting influence in the way he expected to as the team’s undisputed leader. The car was gradually moulded around him until, in 2020, he was served a machine he had confidence in.
Ricciardo executed a career-best year, up there with his breakout 2014 campaign and his super-consistent 2016 season.
He took Renault back to the podium for the first time since it returned to the sport as a works constructor and ended the year an unlikely fifth in the drivers championship.
These were two keys seasons of driver development. Not only did he have to back himself in an external environment, where he had only his reputation to rely on, but he also learnt how to build a new team around himself and mould the car to his advantage.
And while Ricciardo has been criticised in recent years for being insufficiently technically minded — for being fast but not knowing why — after failing to get on top of McLaren’s particular cars, his ability to bring the Renault into his orbit shouldn’t be discounted as an argument to the contrary and a weapon in his arsenal.
Status is less important after a career near-death experience
There’s an interesting parallel universe in which COVID never happens, Ricciardo gets to sample the 2020 Renault before considering his contract options, sticks with the French team and never goes to McLaren.
But the reality is his career progress stalled and slipped backwards in 2021–22.
He can hang his hat on taking McLaren back to the top step of the podium, but that was a sole highlight in two seasons of disappointment that ended in the previously unthinkable scenario of his sacking.
‘Character building’ is a phrase that comes to mind, but in this case it’s more than just a glib saying to paper over some tough times.
Taking such a big step backwards, spiralling into significant self-doubt and losing a spot on the grid changes a driver’s perspective.
“There was a time where I was a little bit bitter, like, ‘I should have had a title by now, this sucks, why don’t I, wrong place, wrong time’ or this or that,” he told Beyond the Grid during his McLaren years.
“But maybe that’s the growth in me or the maturity where I don’t think that anymore. I’m still here because I believe I can win a title and I want to win a title.
“But I’m at peace with whatever happens, as long as I go out and leave it all on the track, I’ll get fulfilment.”
Consider too how Ricciardo has transitioned from last year wanting to contemplate only top-line drives to this year willing to rebuild himself into a driver worthy of a leading seat via a backmarker team — even if the route from bottom to top is very clear in the Red Bull program.
None of that means he’d be prepared to accept an explicit second-driver role. Instead it places him well to take on a challenge like championship-era Verstappen — if he can earn himself that chance — and not collapse under the pressure in the same way that Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon and Sergio Pérez have.
Kevin Magnussen spoke about the weight of expectation having been lifted from his shoulders when he got the call-up to rejoin Haas last year after being dropped. It isn’t because he lacks competitive drive; it’s because he’s had F1 put into perspective by experiencing life outside the sport.
Ricciardo will bring a similar world view to his second chance. To an extent the pressure is off. He’s accountable only to his own expectations.
And if he succeeds and makes it back to Red Bull Racing, he’ll arrive as a better rounded, more mature and faster driver. Whatever happens after that will be because he left, not because he made it back.
“Obviously at the time I felt like it was right for me,” Ricciardo told Beyond the Grid of his decision to leave in 2018. “I felt like I needed a change and I needed to kind of just remove myself a bit.
“I can be honest with myself and say, ‘Yeah, I took a little bit of a gamble on myself’.”
His comeback chance means we still can’t know whether his gamble will pay off.
