It’s getting harder and harder to ignore the feeling. You’ve probably felt it, too, amid the intensifying rumours and increasingly brutal punditry. With every passing race on the F1 calendar, a Daniel Ricciardo resurgence feels further away.
The promise of 2022 removing the shackles on the Australian now nothing but empty. Instead, doubts born out of a difficult debut season with McLaren have persisted well into the new campaign, which now shapes as make-or-break for Ricciardo.
The 32-year-old is contracted for next year, but McLaren boss Zak Brown made it clear on the weekend that both parties have escape clauses.
“I don’t want to get into the contract, but there are mechanisms in which we’re committed to each other, and mechanisms in which we’re not,” Brown said about 2023.
“I spoke with Daniel about it. We’re not getting the results that we both hoped for, but we’re both going to continue to push.”
If you’re feeling confused, in disbelief over how it all came to this so quickly, then spare a thought for Ricciardo who’s ultimately been set up for failure.
We can only speculate over what McLaren’s pitch looked like to pull the driver from Renault after only two seasons, but this isn’t what either party signed up for.
Of course, F1 is unpredictable and there are many assurances teams simply cannot offer, such as being competitive. Ricciardo signed on the dotted line at the end of the 2020 season with no guarantees of success.
However, it’s unlikely that Ricciardo — 31 years old at the time and reaching a critical juncture — would have taken the gamble had he known just how disagreeable the car would be to his driving style.
Twelve months ago, Ricciardo recounted how the driver he replaced at McLaren, Carlos Sainz, asked him how he was adapting to the “strange” car.
“And I was like, ‘Thanks for telling me!’” Ricciardo joked.
Like many jokes, you feel as if there was an element of truth behind it.
True that it takes two to tango — McLaren wouldn’t have offered a contract if it knew Ricciardo would still be trying to adapt. It should also be said that Ricciardo bounced back after the Monaco Grand Prix last year, and could do so again.
Nonetheless, you can’t help but wonder if he got the full picture before signing up to the McLaren project alongside young gun Lando Norris.
The McLaren has, and continues to, strip Ricciardo of his unique driving strengths, replacing them only with doubts.
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