The humbling changes Ricciardo made to deliver the goods for McLaren 

Few images encapsulate the first half of Daniel Ricciardo’s eventful 2021 season quite so graphically 
as the footage of him climbing out of the cockpit 
after dragging his wounded McLaren to 12th (on the road) in the Hungarian Grand Prix. Or, rather,
 pausing halfway through the manoeuvre with his head slumped disconsolately against the car’s halo for what seemed like an age. 

After two seasons with a Renault team which habitually overpromised and under-delivered, Ricciardo made a high-profile move to McLaren for 2021 which should have provided him with a performance upgrade. And yet, after a relatively bright start in the Bahrain season-opener, disappointment piled upon disappointment as Ricciardo struggled to get to grips with an MCL35M chassis in which understeer is the predominant characteristic.

Team-mate Lando Norris adapted quicker, perhaps benefitting from a year’s experience with the car’s predecessor, and the gaps in lap time between the two drivers grew to distances Ricciardo himself felt unbridgeable; in Monaco Ricciardo was eliminated in Q2 while Norris came within three tenths of the pole time. After similar circumstances eventuated during qualifying for the Austrian GP, Ricciardo described the deficit as a “mystery” because he felt “at the limit of everything”. 

Solving that mystery required Ricciardo to sacrifice 
a few sacred cows. Adapting to a new way of driving 
the car required months of chipping away at the margins, scrutinising the data together with race engineer Tom Stallard. Then, after a refreshing break and mental reset over the summer, Ricciardo came back stronger for the final leg of the European season, culminating in that memorable win at Monza – McLaren’s first victory since 2012. 

He qualified fourth in the wet for what ultimately turned out to be a non-race at Spa-Francorchamps, but that was merely a prelude to the Italian Grand Prix weekend. There, not for the first time this year, qualifying left him behind Norris and in a frustrated frame of mind – but this time he was just 0.006s off his fourth-placed team-mate and less than half a tenth slower than third-placed Max Verstappen. 

Ricciardo would later say the anger at being so close to the cars in front spurred him on to achieve what happened next: third place in Saturday’s ‘F1 Sprint’, which became second on the grid for the grand prix (following a penalty for Sprint winner Valtteri Bottas), followed by victory. 

“I was definitely chomping at the bit,” Ricciardo tells GP Racing, “and there was something – an inner confidence I certainly had. I felt better already. Since coming back from the summer break I’d felt refreshed and just ready to go, and Monza is a track
 I love and I felt good.  

Ricciardo channelled inner frustration to score first win since Monaco 2018 at Monza

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“And I’d come up short in that qualifying session. I don’t know, I kind of flipped internally. I was just angry and I channelled that. I’m trying to get there more often now. I can’t say that on the Friday I was convinced I was going to win, but if I look back through the weekend, am I surprised how the weekend ended? Hand on heart
I’m not surprised.” 

Fans used to seeing Ricciardo in full smile mode on TV may struggle to reconcile his general air of grinning bonhomie with these departures into self-confessed “dark places”. But he has long carried the motif of the honey badger – an unpleasantly vicious little creature – on his crash helmet, and those who follow F1 on social media or via the Netflix show Drive to Survive will have
 seen unexpurgated footage of his more extreme reactions to unfavourable events, since these outlets find it irresistible. 


GP Racing suggests to Ricciardo that DTS makers Box To Box must have an entire hard drive set aside for sequences of him dropping the F-bomb with a bilious scream which seems to reverberate with apocalyptic force through his sternum and diaphragm. 

"When I flip or have those moments of rage, it’s when I believe that I could have done it. If it’s a situation where I’m a tenth off, but I know the tenth was on the table and I didn’t get it, that’s when it just eats me inside" Daniel Ricciardo

“I know where it comes from,” he laughs. “As a kid,
I was always a raw competitor in everything, whether
 it was table tennis or a game of Uno, I just hated losing. And I think over the years and probably maturity, I’ve felt better with defeat. But I’m still in some ways a sore loser where I just fucking hate it, you know?  

“So when I flip or have those moments of rage, it’s when I believe that I could have done it. The times where I was miles off, I wasn’t throwing chairs because 
it was more a case of ‘hands up, I don’t know what to do’. But if it’s a situation where I’m a tenth off, but I know the tenth was on the table and I didn’t get it, that’s when it just eats me inside.  

“I’m probably better at channelling that now, and
 I’ve kind of injured myself breaking things in the past so it’s not smart either. Michael, my trainer, knows when I’m like this to kind of hug me and restrain me until I calm down! It’s funny because people probably wouldn’t expect that from me – I’m an easy-going happy guy – but when there is competition in place, I’m a bit of a fucking psychopath I guess.” 

While the win at Monza was an outlier – Ricciardo and second-placed Norris maximised the potential of their cars on a track whose characteristics flattered the MCL35M’s strong points, and were assisted by the title protagonists beaching themselves in the Turn 1 gravel trap – it vindicated McLaren’s approach to getting the most out of its new star driver.

Problems with understeer first manifested themselves at Imola

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

In a recent interview with the official F1 website, Stallard alluded to how round two, the Emilia Romagna GP at Imola, “exposed” the issues Ricciardo was having with the car after he finished an ostensibly encouraging seventh in Bahrain. Ricciardo finished sixth at Imola, but Norris was on the podium. 

One of Ricciardo’s main problems was braking – not great for a driver famed for decisive, bold overtaking moves on the brakes – but this is a somewhat simplistic explanation. The issue was not one of getting used to the characteristics of different materials in the brake system but of how the car behaved while Ricciardo was braking in his preferred style, which is to hold on to some pedal pressure fairly deep into the corner. This ingrained habit was provoking the car into understeer and causing Ricciardo to ship time even though he felt that he was pushing the car as hard as it would go.  

“We have a car that understeers,” said Stallard, “and that’s been something he’s had to adapt to and modify his natural approach to get the best out of.”  

In effect, Ricciardo has had to reprogram his approach bit by bit until the new style became entirely natural and required less mental bandwidth to execute. 

“The natural picture in my head was that every lap 
I do in this car, I’ll just get better,” says Ricciardo. 
“In Bahrain I qualified sixth [sic] or something, and 
I knew I still wasn’t close to 100% comfortable. So in 
my head I was like, ‘Well, each time I drive now I’ll just push the car more and more.’

“And then I, let’s say, hit an early plateau where the limit was a different limit to what I was used to. And to arrive at that limit, I needed to drive the car quite differently. The car has some really strong points, but also some weak points, and I was just trying to navigate my way to the strong points. It didn’t always come natural for me. 

“The key was trying to break it down and understand it corner by corner because, as a whole, there were times where I was seven or eight tenths away [from Norris] and I was like, ‘I can’t do that. I don’t know where that time is.’

Ricciardo has had to review every element of his driving style to get back on terms with Norris

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

“Even with me and Max [Verstappen], a really strong and competitive rivalry, I remember I was furious if he was two tenths faster than me. We all know the calibre of driver Max is. So, and I’m not taking anything away from Lando, a gap that big is like foreign territory really. I’ve never found myself in that position.  

“It wasn’t like I made a mistake here or there, it was I didn’t know where that chunk of time was. Tom was good at bringing it back and saying, ‘Look, let’s analyse, let’s go through this corner – why can’t you do that? What’s stopping you? Let’s figure it out, let’s go from A to B to C, as opposed to just going straight from A to F.’  

“Racecar drivers or athletes, we are a certain amount of stubborn. But you can’t take that to your grave, if you know what I mean. At some point you have to be open-minded and say, ‘Alright, this is what it is. I have to now adapt, and maybe I’m not comfortable with it at first, but take encouragement that the more I learn and get comfortable with it then the better I’ll be.’” 

In the past, McLaren might not have been a team which threw a comforting arm around a struggling driver. Even now, under much-changed management and seemingly in the resurgent, you could understand the leadership team – let alone the crew in the garage – losing confidence in a driver’s ability.

"I’m big enough to take constructive criticism – there were no insults or beating me down, it was always trying to understand, ‘OK, what is the issue? And then how can we help you?’" Daniel Ricciardo

It’s to McLaren’s credit that it remained patient as Ricciardo put all the pieces together, because it wasn’t a linear improvement. In Portugal he didn’t make it out of Q1 and then, in Monaco, as well as failing to make Q3 alongside Norris, he faced the ignominy of having to let Norris past. 

Aerodynamic developments, including a new front wing, arrived early in the season with a view to trimming out some of the understeer, but the fundamentals of the MCL35M were not going to change. Ricciardo spent a great many practice sessions being coached over the radio to redraw his braking profile away from gentle-firm and towards a sharp burst effort, quickly released before corner entry – a process he describes as “a necessary evil” which made him “feel like a rookie again”.

He says, with some understatement, that “it didn’t feel great”, but the process was eased by having a former Olympic rower as an engineer. Having competed himself, Stallard understood that there are days where it’s just not happening, and the outlook is bleak. 

Being lapped by Norris in Monaco was a low point and showed the improvement wasn't a linear curve

Photo by: Erik Junius

“It’s encouraging to have Tom by my side knowing he was a competitive athlete,” says Ricciardo. “Obviously in your team you want somebody who is good at what they do, but what I also really want, what I like, is a competitor, someone who’s going to fight alongside me and look for that last little edge. And obviously Tom is someone who went to the Olympics and brought home a medal, so I know that’s in his character.  

“So that’s cool. And the support of Tom, and really the whole team, was good – they were very understanding and patient, for sure. But, yeah, there was also at times a kind of ‘pull your finger out’. And I’m big enough to take constructive criticism – there were no insults or beating me down, it was always trying to understand, ‘OK, what is the issue? And then how can we help you?’ That was a more modern approach to take and it’s served us well.” 

The 2021 world championship run-in has some tantalising narrative threads going on behind the headline battle between Mercedes and Red Bull and their drivers. It’s battle rejoined between McLaren and Ferrari, title protagonists of old, though now the fight is for third place in the constructors’ championship.

That’s something neither of them would have been pleased about a few years ago but, for now, it represents progress after thin gruel of late. And with a technical reset coming, who knows? Ricciardo reckons that, aged 32, he’s still improving his craft and this season’s transformation proves it. 

“Even if this car doesn’t change for five years then I’ll just get better as a driver,” he says. “It keeps you excited and motivated, knowing you can still improve and still be better. That’s part of the reason you wake up and get on with it every day. That’s exciting.” 

Ricciardo is resolute in his determination to keep improving, even after a decade in F1

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

1, 2, Earnhardt… 

It was during the Bahrain GP weekend that McLaren team boss Zak Brown first dangled the carrot, handing Daniel Ricciardo a model of Dale Earnhardt Sr’s Wranglers-liveried 1984 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. Ricciardo has made no secret of his huge respect for the late NASCAR ace, and adopted Earnhardt’s iconic number 3 when F1 drivers first chose ‘permanent’ race numbers.  

McLaren CEO Zak Brown’s eclectic collection of racing cars includes the Monte Carlo in which Earnhardt mugged Bobby Labonte for the lead on the last lap of the 1984 Talladega 500 to leave his rivals – a pack of 10 – squabbling over second place. Last year Ricciardo won a bet with ex-boss Cyril Abiteboul that he would be able to claim a podium finish for Renault, and he’s come up trumps again at McLaren in 2021.

While Abiteboul has yet to get the tattoo he promised as part of his wager with Ricciardo, Brown has made good on the offer of handing Ricciardo the keys to the ex-Earnhardt Chevrolet. 

Ricciardo’s Monza victory was the trigger for the demo run, staged during the US GP weekend. Brown had the car flown out specially from its current home in the UK for the occasion, which delighted trackside fans as well as Ricciardo – and the Earnhardt family. 

“I’m happy for Daniel,” wrote Dale Earnhardt Jr on Twitter. “I’m also appreciative for how he celebrates my father. That makes a lot of dad’s family members and fans smile.” 

Ricciardo enjoyed emotional demo run at COTA in 1984 Dale Earnhardt Chevrolet Monte Carlo

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images