Daniel Ricciardo will make a sensational return to front-line Formula 1 racing at the upcoming Hungarian Grand Prix, with the Australian set to replace Nyck de Vries at the AlphaTauri team for the rest of the season.
Wow, did not see this coming. I know he hasn’t performed at Yuki’s level yet, but given De Vries’ previous achievements I would assume that he would eventually adapt. Feels like something must have gone sour internally between him and the team to get chucked out before the summer break.
I think you also have to keep in mind the position that de Vries and redbull is in:
- Redbull is looking for a second verstappen-level driver. That’s always been the case not only for redbull, but all tier 1 teams: Their aspirations are championships, not points or even podiums.
- De Vries is a 28 year old rookie. That’s usually the time that drivers retire or lean on their superior experience to make up for their loss in reaction speed and overall pace. The problem is that De Vries has no experience, while being older than Verstappen by close to three years. The fact that he got to race at all is a miracle: He would have to beat Tsunoda every week by quite a margin to become relevant for RedBull. If he doesn’t become relevant for redbull, then why have him at alpha tauri?
Meanwhile they have a young driver in the form of tsunoda which exists in a limbo due to him having nothing to compare against: He could be the fastest driver on the planet in a trash car, or he could be underdelivering without anyone noticing due to the lack of comparison.
This is bad for two reasons:
- you don’t know whether tsunoda is an option for redbull
- you have no idea how good alpha tauri is over all, which is doubly bad considering that they want to make major changes to how alpha tauri operates.
On the other hand, you have a perfectly good Ricciardo sitting on his hands that performed really well at silverstone. Realistically, you aren’t going to lose anything from having Riccardo drive the rest of the season compared to having de Vries drive, but you have to potential upside of more context to the quality of tsunoda and the team, which you wouldn’t get otherwise.
In general I’m more suprised that they ever gave De Vries a chance considering his age and the context to his big achievements:
In formula 2 his stiffest competitor was Nicholas Latifi (He won with 266 vs Latifi’s 214 points) in what can be described as a dud year after the majority of now F1 mainstays had already graduated (he also needed 3 years to win F2, which is never a good sign).
If you have ever seen an formula E race, you will notice that it is quite a chaotic crash-fest with very weird rules and other nonsense. Just not crashing and not driving to quickly can get you really far by surviving the carbon-fiber mayhems and fuel-conservation issues.
To put it into perspective, here are the race records in the year that De Vries won formula E [1st, 9th, retired, retired, 1st, 16th, retired, 9th, retired, 13th, 18th, 2nd, 2nd, 22nd, 8th] or, in short if we ignore all DNFs we get a mean position of 9th!
In short, there’s a reason why Mercedes never even tried to get him an F1 spot: He’s not a bad driver, but being “not a bad driver” is insufficient for a top team like mercedes and redbull. There’s little incentive to put him into any car, even less so nowadays considering his age.
@rullstolsroger @sboulema
lmao right? I was telling everyone don’t trust the news. we’ve entered silly season, only to be linked to an official article 😮
De Vries doesn’t have any significant achievements when you actually look at the details of the F2 and FE championships he won. He’s just not a good driver.
Ah yes, he won a formula 2 and E championship without being a good driver.
It took him 3 years to win the F2 championship and during the year he won, Latifi was his biggest competition.
The year he won the FE championship, there were tons of issues with the structure of qualifying and the races, and the championship standings don’t reflect the skill of the drivers well. His average finishing position that year was 11th out of 22 drivers and he was in the best team. The following year with a revised system that was much better, he finished 9th while he teammate won the championship.
Checo must be sweating and praying Ricciardo still hasn’t found his groove.
From The Guardian’s article on this:
The Red Bull team principal, Christian Horner, said at the British Grand Prix that the team were still committed to Pérez. “He’s the type of guy that just needs an arm around his shoulder and you work with him,” he said. Tellingly, in 2020, Horner said of Albon, then also struggling at Red Bull: “We need to be patient with him and we’ll put an arm around his shoulder and make sure he feels he’s got the support.” Albon was replaced at the end of the season by Pérez.
Lol at that comparison to Albon. Perez has produced some of my all-time favorite drives but there’s no question he’s in a big slump at the moment, and RB is rutheless with their non-Max drivers. I hope Ric does well enough to at least keep a seat somewhere on any team, even if it’s not RB
This is wild, I thought De Vries would at least finish out the season.
Considering that Ricciardo’s struggle with McLaren was the bad and weird braking performance and considering that tsunoda has struggled with braking several times in the alpha tauri this may not end good for Ric. It will be good to see him back though.
This cat has 9 lives. Really hoping he lands on his feet and does well at AT. He truly is one of my favorite drivers both on and off the track. Really wish him the best and hoping he finds a good drive next season.
Unfortunately Riccardo has always had the Problem that he’s inconsistent. He can win races and challenge for the podium. But he can also barely make it to Q2 a few races later.
Not that I blame him for that. It’s just that there are more consistent driver out there.
