Why Zandvoort offers Ricciardo the best chance of first F1 comeback success

In a Formula 1 season such as 2023, success must be viewed as relative across the grid.

Since it successfully negotiated its Monaco peril, with a big helping hand from Aston Martin’s strategy mistake, Red Bull should clean up in this campaign. There’s simply no reason to predict anything but a ninth consecutive Max Verstappen victory on the championship’s return from its summer break this weekend, with 10 races now between Red Bull and a unique perfect season. Its success is absolute.

But how can Aston’s winter leap up the order, McLaren’s in-season form turnaround or Nico Hulkenberg’s return from the F1 wilderness to effectively lead Haas not be viewed as success of sorts? Even if competitors aren’t claiming the biggest prizes, there’s much to celebrate in a campaign such as this.

Enter Daniel Ricciardo. The Australian is heading to this weekend’s 2023 Dutch Grand Prix for the third race of his second Red Bull chapter, slotting in alongside Yuki Tsunoda at AlphaTauri.

Ricciardo had thought that if his Red Bull simulator work combined well enough with his post-Silverstone tyre test showing then he would possibly be making his second bow with the former Toro Rosso team at Zandvoort. As it was, with Helmut Marko’s axe swinging with shocking swiftness on Nyck de Vries’s AlphaTauri (and likely F1 overall) career, Ricciardo’s return came two races earlier. But his Hungary and Spa outings were altogether different affairs.

A simplistic view would be that one was good and one was bad. But such a sweep actually ignores how good Ricciardo was after he’d been caught up in the first corner melee at the Hungaroring, particularly on his mammoth third stint run to 13th. That all followed having never driven the AT04 before the weekend.

PLUS: The times that show how good Ricciardo's F1 return really was

And, although there can be no doubt Tsunoda performed brilliantly to put Ricciardo in his shadow as he claimed the final Spa point with 10th, it also misses the positive moments of that tricky wet-to-dry weekend. Ricciardo, after all, qualified just outside the Q3 cut for the sprint race and ended the shorter event in 10th having battled quicker cars that ultimately finished not far ahead.

Ricciardo impressed to finish 10th in the sprint at Spa where his preparation was compromised by the washout in the weekend's only practice session

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

F1’s pre-summer break run from one side of Europe to the other really highlighted AlphaTauri’s challenge for the rest of the 2023. Ricciardo’s own fits on top.

This is that the AT04 performs best on F1’s high-downforce tracks. After all, back in Monaco, Tsunoda made Q3 while de Vries ended up close to the points. But, when the championship decamps to venues that require an aerodynamic efficiency compromise, the AlphaTauri struggles with shedding downforce on corner entry. This robs its drivers of confidence in a pivotal area. Plus, overall, it still lacks downforce and aero load compared to the leading machines.

But Zandvoort returns the white-and-blue package to the high-downforce arena. It’s more of a compromise than Monaco with its main straight run between the banked final corner and Tarzan, but for most of the rest of the 2.65-mile lap it’s an unrelenting run of demanding corners.

"We're going to get to Zandvoort being much better prepared than if Zandvoort was my first race. And I think it kind of springboards us a bit better into the second half of the season" Daniel Ricciardo

The added downforce AlphaTauri will be packing on with its bigger rear wing package, alongside the rest, should theoretically reduce the rear sliding Ricciardo couldn’t arrest even when running in clear air at Spa. He also suspected a set-up mistake on that sprint weekend, with its sole practice session a washout, might’ve made things worse back in the Ardennes.

So, his car is back on the track type it prefers and Ricciardo had pledged to spend his summer break improving his fitness levels compared to the rivals that had started their 2023 campaigns back in March. Although he rued not drinking enough over the race distance after his Hungary re-emergence, he’d feared feeling worse after his first race stint in eight months.

But Zandvoort’s run of corners, as Ricciardo put it at Spa, are “very hard on the neck”. He’ll therefore be hoping his efforts over the August shutdown – having already had to shift a planned holiday that would’ve started in Los Angeles on the Belgian GP media day for the start of his comeback – have paid off.

“When I got the call up, in my head I was like, ‘Oh, OK, I thought we'd probably just wait for the summer break,’” Ricciardo said of his unexpected two-race pre-break stint post-Spa. “But I'm actually really glad I got these two before the break, because it gives me something to certainly think about, build on, throw some questions back to the team.

Ricciardo hopes his first two outings will help him be far better prepared when F1 returns from its summer break

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

“I feel like we're going to get to Zandvoort being much better prepared than if Zandvoort was my first race. And I think it kind of springboards us a bit better into the second half of the season.”

If Zandvoort represents Ricciardo’s best chance of scoring the first real success of his revitalised F1 career, such an accomplishment must be viewed through the 2023 relativeness requirement. If Ricciardo scores points and helps AlphaTauri start closing the eight-point gap between its current 10th place in the constructors’ standings and Williams’s seventh, that’d be a fine achievement.

With Monza following next week before F1 heads back to AlphaTauri’s preferred higher downforce settings in Singapore and Japan, it can be expected that the team and the form of its drivers will fluctuate. But it must grab what it can on its better days. The same is true in the massed pack just behind – there’s that relative thinking again – Red Bull.

Having run Verstappen close enough in Monaco, Aston should be targeting the Dutch race as a very important event in its efforts to recapture its podium-taking early season form. Things haven’t been right since Fernando Alonso finished second in Canada, with the green team open in admitting it has made a few missteps in its recent car development upgrades.

Then on the eve of the summer break, it emerged that the FIA had been clamping down on flexing front wings, which coincided with Aston’s form dipping (although there is no suggestion it was doing anything illegal).

Aston, which is set to introduce further upgrades for the AMR23 at Zandvoort, will be hoping the beachside track’s technical challenge can help it nudge a season that has shifted rather off course of late back in the right direction. But it must do so paying particular attention to its lower-speed corner performance, as this was excellent during the early rounds but tailed off post-Monaco – just when the flexi-wing clampdown came into effect.

The 2023 campaign has been very far from what Ferrari’s positive tone setting Fiorano launch suggested might be to come. But the Scuderia is at least returning to a circuit where Charles Leclerc should have secured pole last year, but for a small Turn 10 mistake on the final Q3 runs.

Even more encouragingly, in Hungary and Belgium the red team appeared to have finally made major progress on its longstanding in-race tyre management weakness. That was a factor that kept Leclerc from threatening Verstappen on home turf in the 2022 race after they’d shared the front row.

Could the return to a high-downforce layout bring Aston Martin back into contention at the sharp end after Alonso pushed Verstappen hard at Monaco?

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

The RB19 remains vulnerable to qualifying behind a rival, as Lewis Hamilton showed for Mercedes in Hungary and Leclerc back in Baku, which should therefore offer the latter in particular hope given his sparkling one-lap form here a year ago, once he’d addressed a low-fuel understeer issue.

Overtaking is tricky at Zandvoort and harder in the current machines compared to those of 2022, but all that, of course, must be measured against Red Bull’s stunning race pace and its potent DRS threat.

But it should also not be forgotten that, but for the late-race virtual and real safety car interruptions, Mercedes looked a genuine threat for the win even with its recalcitrant W13. This was down to the team opting for a bold one-stop strategy on the hards (which are softer in 2023) compared to Verstappen’s two-stopper.

Historical form offers hope for the subplots of this campaign this weekend. But even podiums for Aston, Ferrari or Mercedes at Zandvoort would represent relative success. They’re all aiming for the dominant home hero, after all.

A bold one-stop strategy almost brought Mercedes into victory contention at Zandvoort last year

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images