Ricciardo: talent alone is not enough

Ninety-six metres. Not far is it? Yet it will make all the difference for Daniel Ricciardo at the start of next season.

It is the distance between where he started the first race of 2013 and the front row of the grid, where you can guarantee he will aspire to be next March. But that tiny distance will transform the scale of the challenge he faces.

Why? Because of pressure.

In the most prosaic terms, of course there's no difference in what he's doing. Ricciardo will still be sat in a grand prix car with tyres at each corner, an engine and gearbox in the back and a steering wheel in his hands. The speeds will not be dramatically different, then handling differences subtle but not significant in the grand scheme of things.

Even so, if the Red Bull is as competitive next year as it has been for the previous four seasons, the game will have changed beyond all recognition for Ricciardo.

Pressure is a word simultaneously over-used and misunderstood in sport. But the way you deal with it is arguably the main performance differentiator once you get to the highest echelons of elite sport. After all, in Formula 1, a couple of tenths of a second can separate the great from the merely decent.

When any driver steps up from the midfield into a top team, they will by definition have shown themselves capable of cutting it at the front, but until they are there dealing with the situation, nobody can be absolutely certain how they will fare.

Will Ricciardo handle the pressure of competing for Red Bull? © LAT

Pressure is directly related to expectations. This year, what expectations does Ricciardo place on himself? In a qualifying session, his aim will be to get as far up the grid as possible but it's natural that beating his team-mate is the key battle.

He's beaten him plenty of times on Saturdays before, so his mindset is simply likely to be 'if I don't mess this up, odds are I'm going to be ahead'. Even with the curveball of a Red Bull seat to bid for, that is not the same level of pressure.

With Vettel alongside him and a world championship team, it's a whole different situation. Racing drivers, often even the mediocre ones, are supremely confident. But pressure is a factor that can disrupt everything even for drivers who do have the fundamental speed.

Ricciardo will go into the first qualifying session of the year knowing that simply doing a good job won't be good enough to trouble a team-mate who has racked up 39 pole positions. He must be at 100 per cent, every corner.

He's shown he can do that, but the knowledge that he cannot leave anything on the table when it comes to laptime will have an effect. The last fractions of a percent of his performance will be starkly exposed.

Dealing with the pressure is all about maintaining focus on the process rather than the end result. This is why there are so many cliches in sport about taking it step-by-step (particularly popular with Vettel), one game at a time, focusing on the job in hand etc. It's also why drivers don't like setting objectives.

Those who deal with pressure best are the ones that simply set all thoughts about having to beat somebody or achieve a certain points haul thrive. If your mind is focused on the job in hand rather than a bigger picture, that allows you to perform to the maximum.

The true greats in sport rarely let this get in the way, although experience of high-pressure situations is usually required to reach that point.

Button, largely unflappable today, struggled to sleep at times during his title-winning 2009 campaign © XPB

Jenson Button is a fine example. Today, he is largely unflappable, but in the middle of 2009 when fighting to hold onto a championship lead at the same time as struggling to get onto the podium he showed the strain.

At the time, he vehemently denied the pressure getting to him. Subsequently, he admitted he was struggling to sleep at times while grimly holding on to his points lead.

His stuttering performances were down to a confluence of factors - the Brawn was not the dominant machine it initially was in the second half of the year - but at the heart of it was that desperation to get the results he realised he needed. The objective was everything and the step-by-step process went out the window.

In everyday life, it's the equivalent of spending your time preoccupied with the need to do something rather than being able to knuckle down and do it. And much as some expect professional sportspeople to be superhuman, they aren't. They have pretty much the same neurological architecture as the rest of the human race with all the flaws that implies.

Talent is an unhelpful word. Presented by some as some innate quality, or for those of a spiritual bent a God-given gift, 'talent' is really shorthand for a huge range of qualities, skills, physical attributes, genetic characteristics, experiences, personality traits and work ethic.

Unquestionably, Ricciardo has the tools at his disposal to be as good as Vettel, but the way he deals with the pressure will be the deciding factor of whether he sinks or swims. You can tick every other box, but if you allow pressure and expectation to overtake you, you will not thrive.

If you ask whether he is talented enough to deliver, you're actually talking about a complex network of inter-related qualities, all tied together by the mind's ability to deliver under an intense spotlight.

Alonso, Vettel and Hamilton are able to deliver under the most trying circumstances © XPB

Sporting history is littered with those that had the 'talent' but when they hit the upper strata of their chosen disciplines didn't have what it takes to deal with the pressure and deliver.

The difference in raw material between the 22 drivers on the F1 grid is negligible. Even the 'bad' ones of the current crop, whoever you think they are, lack very little compared to the top guns.

On a given lap, on a given day, most are likely to be capable of setting a laptime in identical circumstances within a surprisingly small margin of each other.

What makes the difference is consistency of delivering even in the most trying circumstances.

That's what makes the great drivers so remarkable. Fernando Alonso is not the fastest driver on the grid, yet his relentless nature means he can be relied upon to deliver (unless he becomes too frustrated).

Sebastian Vettel is not several percent faster than Mark Webber fundamentally, but his brilliant execution of qualifying and the early laps of races means he is able to outscore him comfortably. Lewis Hamilton can be utterly imperious in a way that arguably no other driver can. And Kimi Raikkonen just gets on with it in a manner that defines the word 'unflustered'.

It is this mental strength that allows them to be better than the rest. It is also why you can never be 100 per cent certain any driver, no matter how good, will thrive in the spotlight of a top team environment.

There are certainly indicators; performance in high-stress situations, progress in junior formulas, but when you are at the pinnacle the pressure is on a whole new level.

It is what makes elite sport so fascinating and unpredictable, ensuring that even after a driver like Ricciardo has devoted his whole life to getting to the top, the real test only starts once he gets there.