Daniel Ricciardo’s Formula 1 career, which spanned 15 seasons and included eight grand prix victories, deserved a more fitting end that the one which transpired in Singapore.
But his RB team has now indicated he won’t return to the cockpit for the next race. Making the circumstances all the more poignant, F1 is heading to Austin next, a venue the charming and enormously popular driver has developed a deep affinity for.
Ricciardo arrived in Singapore facing fresh questions over his future. To begin with, RB admitted to no more than their intention to review the performance of their drivers following this weekend’s race.
But following the grand prix came an unmistakeable change of tone. RB team principal Laurent Mekies claimed in the team’s press release that they allowed Ricciardo to make an extra pit stop and push to set the fastest lap because “this may have been Daniel’s last race.”
Many were sceptical about this version of events, not least McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown. He pointed out that, while Ricciardo stood to gain nothing from the fastest lap, it deprived race winner Lando Norris of a vital bonus point in his pursuit of Max Verstappen.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner, however, was grateful for the efforts of their second team’s driver. Of course neither Red Bull nor RB admitted any connection between the two.
But whatever the true motivation behind Ricciardo’s fastest lap bid, it produced a moment rich in symbolism. Horner and Brown are both former employers of Ricciardo, and what successes might they have enjoyed together had his career taken a different course?
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Ricciardo lingered in the cockpit of his RB 01 after taking the chequered flag, sitting quietly in the darkness before emerging to face the inevitable questions. Including, once again, the most inevitable of them all: Did he make a mistake by leaving Red Bull six years earlier?
“At the time, obviously in my head everything made sense,” he told Nico Rosberg, the latest person to ask him, on Sky. “But was it the best decision of my career? Of course you could argue no, it wasn’t.
“I’m okay with that. It’s one of those ones, also, there’s no guarantee that if I stayed I would have done amazing and won this and that. So you never know. But of course I’m not going to stand here and say that was the greatest decision of my life.
“But you live and you learn and obviously it eventually brought me back into the family and I don’t want to look back and be kind of sad or bitter about anything. Everything, I guess, happens for a reason.”
Ricciardo made his career-defining decision to leave Red Bull in mid-2018. They had brought him into Formula 1 and made him a race winner, but facing a rising challenge of Max Verstappen in the other car, Ricciardo decided a better chance of success lay at Renault.
Six years on, no one can convincingly argue Ricciardo was wrong to identify Verstappen as a threat. Now a three-times world champion, Verstappen has thrashed every driver who has occupied that seat since Ricciardo: First Pierre Gasly, then Alexander Albon and now Sergio Perez.
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Whether Ricciardo might have done better compared to them is something we’ll never know. Horner certainly reckoned Ricciardo had lost little of his pace when he returned to test for Red Bull last year. But he has only showed frustratingly brief glimpses of that kind of performance since then – and that ended his hopes of regaining his race seat at Red Bull.
In the intervening period, Ricciardo missed another chance to get his hands on a championship-winning car. Having correctly sussed Renault were not on a path to the front of the field (their rebranded team is presently second from bottom in the points), Ricciardo headed to McLaren in 2021.
This proved a smart choice of team. Three years later, McLaren are leading the constructors’ championship and have a chance of taking one of their drivers to the title too.
But Ricciardo, of course, is long gone. Despite his surprise victory at Monza in 2021, he was persistently shown up by Lando Norris, and McLaren cut his three-year contract short after just two seasons.
Red Bull and McLaren were the two great missed opportunities of Ricciardo’s career. Had things played out differently he could have been driving either of their race-winning, championship-leading cars on Sunday.
So it was deeply ironic that he should find himself playing what might even turn out to be a championship-deciding role for his two former team mates. By denying Norris the fastest lap point, Ricciardo has ensured Verstappen can finish second to his rival in all the remaining races and still win the title.
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There is much more racing to be done before we learn whether that was a decisive moment. But sadly not, it seems, for Ricciardo.
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2024 Singapore Grand Prix
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