The 2024 season was likely to end one of two ways for Daniel Ricciardo: A recall back to the race-winning team he walked out of six years earlier, or the end of his Formula 1 racing career. Regrettably for the enormously popular 35-year-old, it turned out to be the latter.
The opening rounds set the pattern for Ricciardo’s truncated season. Having been allowed past an irate Yuki Tsunoda in Bahrain he was too far off his team mate’s pace at the next round in Jeddah. Ricciardo’s home race underlined his plight as he was eliminated in Q1, then his Japanese Grand Prix ended when he tangled with Alexander Albon on the first lap.There were a few moments when Ricciardo could hold his head high. His performance in the Miami Grand Prix sprint race looked like the Ricciardo of old as he started and finished fourth, beaten only by the Red Bulls and a Ferrari. He showed a fine touch in the tricky conditions in Canada, taking eighth place despite a penalty for a jump start caused by a creeping clutch.
But these were the exceptions to an otherwise consistently underwhelming season. Ricciardo’s qualifying performances were consistently sub-par and he exacerbated his low grid positions by tending to lose places at the start. Indeed, by the time Red Bull finally gave up on coaxing Ricciardo back to his past best, he was statistically the worst starter on the grid.
Daniel Ricciardo
Best | Worst | |
---|---|---|
GP start | 5 | 20 |
GP finish | 8 | 18 |
Points | 12 |
Occasionally he was able to improve his positions during races, but far more often he had given himself too much to do by lap two and points were a rarity. Yes, RB lost its way with car development, but they were hardly the only team to bring a duff upgrade during 2024, and a driver of Ricciardo’s experience (he passed 250 grands prix last year) should have been better placed than most to cope with the setbacks.
By the second half of the season the writing was on the wall for Ricciardo. He went out in Q1 in his last two appearances. In a final irony, his last act as an F1 driver was to take the fastest lap away from Max Verstappen’s championship rival; so despite never returning to Red Bull he at least performed one useful last piece of service for them.
RaceFans’ driver rankings are based partly on the scores awarded to drivers for their performances in each round as well as other factors.
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AdrianMorse (@adrianmorse)
21st January 2025, 12:16
Hard to fathom this is the same driver that won the Racefans driver of the year ranking twice. After his disappointing McLaren stint, he’s had his second chance at least.
Jere (@jerejj)
21st January 2025, 12:29
I predicted correctly. Therefore, more or less all subpar drivers have been covered.
Simon
21st January 2025, 22:42
Absolutely thrilled for you
Tony Mansell (@tonymansell)
22nd January 2025, 10:41
ha ha
David BR (@david-br)
21st January 2025, 12:46
I always rooted for Ricciardo but sadly we never really saw again the driver of the Red Bull years. He had every opportunity last year and this to make his way back to the main team alongside Verstappen. But it wasn’t there. Pretty sad.
Phil Norman (@phil-f1-21)
21st January 2025, 15:39
I agree. I had really hoped he might make something of his opportunity at RB and get back into the lead team. He had his chance laid on for him.
Tony Mansell (@tonymansell)
21st January 2025, 14:00
Possibly suffered from the same issues Lewis has found with the ground effect cars but certainly a shadow of his former self and unable to adapt.
Ideals (@ideals)
21st January 2025, 14:59
Eh, he already started this run of form all the way back in 2020, long before ground effect was even a thing.
Tony Mansell (@tonymansell)
21st January 2025, 15:59
Maybe check before you ‘eh’ eh? 2020 he finished 5th overall, in a Renault, and won a race in 2021, i’d forgotten that ground effect was delayed a year but his real drop off was from 2022 and he was nowhere near in 23/24. I also use the word ‘possibly.’ In hindsight you might argue that his drop off started on the 3rd August 2018 but i wasn’t arguing, just positing
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
21st January 2025, 16:33
One thing though: 2021 was a pretty bad year too for ricciardo, I wouldn’t say his drop off started in 2022, he just got even worse, but 2021 was already unacceptable and a second season like that would’ve still resulted in him being fired.
Monza win was on merit, but as a f1 driver when you have 2-3 good races in a whole season, that’s just not enough, and he continued that trend at toro rosso.
BasCB (@bascb)
22nd January 2025, 11:03
Yeah, that win, that weekend, he seemed to be on form, but it was one of a few weekends where he looked like the driver we all liked to see on track with good spead and solid moves.
MichaelN
21st January 2025, 17:13
Ricciardo’s season in 2021 was considered poor by what was then expected of him (RaceFans wrote: “In Formula 1 outright performance is the ultimate metric, and so Ricciardo’s 2021 season cannot be considered a success in that respect.”) but his average positions compared to Norris were still kinda okay. He was ~1,5 positions behind in the races, ~3 in qualifying. (Compared to Piastri last year: ~1 in the race, ~2 in qualifying.)
The 2022 season was a lot worse.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
21st January 2025, 16:32
Agree with mansell, that was a terrible take about 2020, ricciardo demolished ocon that season; blaming ground effects and adaptability for ricciardo’s underperformance is spot on.
anon
21st January 2025, 22:13
@ideals as noted by several others, Ricciardo actually performed significantly above expectations in 2020 by finishing in 5th place in the WDC and was widely considered to be one of the best drivers that season. Indeed, many posters on this site complained when Ricciardo was only rated the 5th best driver in 2020, saying that he should easily have been in the top three that year.
@esploratore1 as MichaelN notes, Ricciardo’s performance in 2021, when you take a wider view of things, was a bit disappointing, but not particularly dreadful either – it was viewed more harshly at the time because Ricciardo’s form in 2020 had created some very high expectations of him in 2021, and perhaps created unrealistically high expectations that he’d always struggle to reach.
It’s not to say that his performances were fine or that he shouldn’t have been criticised in 2021, because Ricciardo’s performances did have flaws to them. However, Tony Mansell is right to point out that Norris was also publicly criticising the handling traits of McLaren’s cars of the time and noting that the way to get the best performance out of them required a driving style that ran rather counter to what Ricciardo was used to, and the decline in Ricciardo’s performance seems to have really been exaggerated by the current ground effect cars and their specific handling traits.
Magnussen has commented that the current cars are really ill suited to trail braking or trying to maximise apex speeds in slow corners, as the cars are not particularly stable when trying to deal with combined lateral and longitudinal loads – instead, they seem to work better if you load the front end up with rapid forward weight transfer, make the front end rotate around quickly and then power out of the corner (it’s what he referred to as a “V” shaped cornering line, and one that minimises the amount of time the car spends turning, even if it means the apex speed is lower).
In the case of Ricciardo, Magnussen noted that he is probably the driver who has been most negatively impacted by that change in the handling traits of the cars. Now, added to that the fact that Ricciardo is known to have been strongly disinterested in the technical side of the sport and not really engaged with his engineers, and you have a situation where, once he’s started losing his way, he lacked some options to try and turn that around and he seems to have ended up in a self-reinforcing cycle of losing confidence and losing performance.
Tony Mansell (@tonymansell)
22nd January 2025, 10:46
Agree with all that, its always more nuanced than a post can ever achieve, maybe yours apart perhaps; but i think before it was more, you need to buck up your ideas a bit Daniel to, wow he’s totally gone. Finding a silver bullet for that is a fools errand but i attempted it anyway!
BasCB (@bascb)
21st January 2025, 14:37
Sorry, but that first sentence is nonsense. By the start of this season it was all but clear that Daniel was not the man Horner (and possibly he himself) wanted to hope he still was. He was never really in the running any more as far as i can see.
Hard to really rate him for this year, but yeah towards the back is certainly where it was.
Sad to see how it went, I doubt there were many fans who did not want to believe and hope he would find his mojo, speed and the fun back when he got his shot at RB junior last year. It would have been a great story and a wholesome result. But it turned out that McLaren was simply correct to drop him since it wasn’t there anymore.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
21st January 2025, 16:37
Yes, even taking into account that he wasn’t demolished by tsunoda as badly as he did by norris, tsunoda was never really a top driver and he was comprehensively beaten by gasly: peak ricciardo should’ve been at the very least gasly level, if not better, so I can see why red bull decided being unable to beat tsunoda wasn’t enough to continue even with the B team.
MoogleSlam
21st January 2025, 21:58
One of my favorite drivers, but this ranking is unfortunately deserved. I’d love to see him get one more shot in a car that suits his driving style.
Chris (@austin-healey)
22nd January 2025, 12:55
Another mitigating factor that hasn’t been mentioned was some of the Cash App crap strategy calls.
Some absolutely horrendous calls on tyres and pitstop timing.