Daniel Ricciardo has hit back at critics of his Formula 1 performances and insists he has not ‘forgotten how to drive in six months.’
The Australian joined McLaren from Renault for the start of the 2021 season and, despite winning the team’s first race since 2012 at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, was widely considered to have underdelivered and could not extract the same consistent performance from the car as team-mate Lando Norris.
After a year settling into the team and learning about the intricacies of the Mercedes engine which McLaren run, Ricciardo seemed set for an improvement heading into 2022. In the opening seven rounds of the current campaign, though, the gap between Norris and the 32-year-old has increased significantly.
Norris is currently seventh in the drivers’ standings with 48 points, while Ricciardo is only 11th on 11 points. In seven races so far in 2022, Ricciardo has only finished in the top ten once, at his home grand prix in Melbourne.
Those results led McLaren CEO Zak Brown to label Ricciardo’s results since joining the team ‘disappointing’, and the American threw his driver’s future into doubt when he said that the agreement the pair have signed until 2023 is not water-tight, with ‘mechanisms’ in place to remove Ricciardo if he does not improve.
Now the former Red Bull driver has spoken about trying to manage his doubts about himself.
‘It kind of ebbs and flows where sometimes I’ll get down on myself,’ he explained to crash.net. ‘But then other times, I’m fired up and motivated to prove a lot of people wrong and prove myself right.
‘More times than not, I’ll kind of chuckle at the doubt. Because even last year, for sure, there were times where I was trying to figure it out. Already in April and May [last year] there were articles like ‘he’s lost it’ but six months earlier in 2020 I was regarded as one of the standout drivers of that season.’
Ricciardo could be replaced by one of two drivers McLaren have an interest in who are currently racing in IndyCar in the United States, Mexican Pato O’Ward and American Colton Herta. But Ricciardo believe he hasn’t lost the talent which has brought him eight F1 victories, and says he is determined to prove doubters wrong.
‘The reality is I’ve not forgotten how to drive in six months, I haven’t lost my competitive edge, it’s just kind of a moment in time that I knew I could come out of. You are always going to get people saying this and that. It is what it is. It’s up to me in the car to prove them wrong.
‘But no one’s going to get into me more than myself as well, so someone telling me that I need to pull my finger out is not going to change me because if they are telling me to pull my finger out then I’m telling myself much more.’
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