Ricciardo's inconsistency cost him his race seat – Horner

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner says the lack of consistency that Daniel Ricciardo showed this season ended up costing him his race seat in Formula 1. Ricciardo has been replaced by Liam Lawson for the rest of the 2024 season at RB, effectively ending his time in F1 after 257 race starts. The Australian was given a race seat partway through 2023 to see if he could be a potential replacement for Sergio Perez in future if needed, but Horner says an inability to deliver regular high-level performances proved costly. “I think it was the lack of consistency,” Horner said. “I mean he started the season roughly, then Miami was a weekend of two halves, the Friday and Saturday morning was fantastic and it looked like the Daniel of old – defending against Ferraris and out-driving the car – but then Saturday afternoon and the Sunday were disastrous. “Even around Barcelona, Helmut (Marko, Red Bull Racing director) wanted him out of the car, and there was already a lot of pressure on him there. But by the time we got to Montreal it was actually dear old Jacques Villeneuve who got him properly wound up by giving him a hard time. (ED: The 1997 world champion was critical of Ricciardo in the media). “It definitely fired him up because the way he drove the car that weekend, he grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and put together a very strong race weekend. So I did say, ‘give Jacques a call every grand prix for the rest of the year!’ because whatever he said it definitely worked.” But after having given Ricciardo a chance to return to Red Bull, Horner said the version of the driver that rejoined the team from McLaren at the end of 2022 was very different to the one he’d known previously. “I didn’t recognize the Daniel at the end of his tenure at McLaren,” he said. And I said to him ‘why don’t you come and join us, rediscover your passion for the sport, we’ve got a whole bunch of sponsors and partners and Max hates doing all that stuff, so you’re going to have to shake a few hands and turn up to a few events, but if there’s an opportunity to stick you back in the car we can see if you’ve still got it, if you rediscover your mojo’. “He picked up some really bad habits when he came back from McLaren, in the car, and bit by bit, working by his old engineering team, he started to find his form again. Then we stuck him in the car for a test at Silverstone, just after the grand prix, and he knew that was a big test for him because Nyck de Vries had been slightly underwhelming in the AlphaTauri at the time, and of course we needed a backup solution for Sergio if he weren’t to deliver. “So Daniel put in an outstanding performance at Silverstone, and then based off that we decided to put him into the AlphaTauri for the remainder of the year, and unfortunately, he had a great start in Hungary, but then shortly after, the race at Zandvoort, he had an innocuous-looking accident but obviously the lashback on the steering wheel broke his hand quite badly. “That knocked him out for four or five races, at which point gave Liam the opportunity to step in and it’s like ‘OK this kid can drive as well’. So in the end we elected to take experience over youth because the purpose of Daniel… he wasn’t a junior driver, he was there as a backstop in the event Sergio wasn’t finding his form.”