THE BIG ‘BACK OR NOT BACK’ QUESTION FACING DANIEL RICCIARDO IN CRUCIAL BRITISH GRAND PRIX
Accepting Silverstone will determine if “Daniel’s back” or “Daniel’s not back”, Daniel Ricciardo hopes his Austrian GP points will have a “positive ripple effect” on his performance.
Ricciardo’s Formula 1 future is on the line with the Honey Badger under pressure from Liam Lawson, and apparently Red Bull’s stakeholders too.
Daniel Ricciardo: But as we know, it can change like that…
Additional reporting by Thomas Maher
Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko admitted to that when he told Kleine Zeitung that the “shareholders have made it clear that it is a junior team and we have to act accordingly.
“We will have to put a young driver in there soon. That would be Liam Lawson.”
All though is not lost as RB CEO Peter Bayer told PlanetF1.com’s Thomas Maher that no decision has been made as the team will only sit down and discuss their 2025 driver line-up during the summer break.
That means there’s time for Ricciardo to stake his claim on the second RB seat with the team having already confirmed Yuki Tsunoda.
The Aussie is hoping his ninth-placed finish last time out in Austria will be the “positive ripple effect” as he tries to show the world that “Daniel’s back”.
“It helps, obviously,” he told the media including PlanetF1.com in the build-up to the British Grand Prix weekend.
“It’s one of those ones that not only helps me, my future and whatever, but it helps me, my confidence, it helps my engineers’ confidence, the mechanics, everyone.
“Like it just, it has a really obviously positive ripple effect when you do well and you have that spring in your step and everyone feels that and they’re like, ‘all right, let’s go’.”
“I feel like it’s starting to come together a little bit more the way I envisioned.
“But as we know, it can change like that. I have another good weekend here, then it’s like ‘Daniel’s back and he’s freaking there’ and that, if I have a s**t weekend, then ‘Daniel’s not back’.
“So you can’t ever get too far ahead of yourself here, but will I use that little bit of a spring in my step and try to keep using it? Absolutely.”
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Daniel Ricciardo confirms RB experiments are ‘done’
Ricciardo’s second Grand Prix top ten result came on the back of RB running comparison tests during the Friday practice at the Red Bull Ring as the team tried to understand why its Spanish GP upgrade failed.
The team seeming ironed out the issues with Ricciardo confirming there will be no more experimenting in Friday’s running at Silverstone.
“I would say for now, the experimenting’s done and we have both cars on the same stuff this week and it’s honestly a mixture of new and old,” he said.
“So, we at least have more confidence coming into this weekend that we’ve got currently our best package and should be pretty straightforward now.
“It’s not unlikely to have some downgrades through the season, they’re not, unfortunately, all upgrades.
“But up until that point, I felt everything we were putting on the car worked and was giving us performance.
“So, of course, as you say, it’s not that, ‘oh, it didn’t work’, it’s also, okay, understanding why it didn’t work so that we can obviously, you know… what we bring moving forward is obviously going to benefit us.
“So yeah, a little bit of understanding to take place but at least with what we have confidence that we now have currently the best parts on the car.”
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