Struggling in recent years to match his race-winning form from his Red Bull days, David Coulthard says Daniel Ricciardo’s F1 career “whimpered out” – and he cannot blame the ground-effect aerodynamic cars.
Ricciardo‘s last three campaigns in F1, 2022 to 2024, were without a doubt his most difficult, prompting McLaren and the Aussie to part ways at the end of the 2022 season despite a year remaining on his contract.
Daniel Ricciardo went from the highs of Red Bull to being axed twice in three years
And now VCARB have also called time, announcing after the Singapore Grand Prix that Ricciardo had been replaced by reserve driver Liam Lawson with immediate effect.
The decision brings an end to the 35-year-old’s career which spanned 14 seasons and included eight grand prix victories, 32 podiums and three pole positions. He scored the bulk of those during his five years with Red Bull where he was twice P3 in the Drivers’ Championship.
In the last three years, of which it has to be noted only 2022 was a full campaign, he wasn’t even able to break into the top 10 in the standings.
From the highs of Red Bull to being dropped twice in three years, former Red Bull driver Coulthard believes Ricciardo’s just fizzled out.
“The career of Daniel Ricciardo,” the Scot said on the Formula For Success podcast, “would appear that would be it for Formula 1.
“Arrived with a bang, really asserted himself as one of the best overtakers in the other part of his career, won a heap of grands prix – he’s leaving the sport with eight grand prix victories.
“But it kind of whimpered out, let’s be honest about it.
“And it’s always difficult when you’re talking about people you know, but if we put to one side personal feelings and just look at the data, it just didn’t really seem to work for the last few years.
“Is it just ebb and flow of sportsmen and women’s talents are not infinite, they all have a timeline?”
The end of the F1 road for Daniel Ricciardo
Although Ricciardo had most of his F1 success with Red Bull, he did manage podiums with Renault and even scored a race win with McLaren in 2021 to bring his overall tally to eight.
But a year later he was destroyed by his team-mate Lando Norris who outscored him by 122 points to 37 in the first year of F1’s ground-effect cars.
He did conclude his final lap in a ground-effect car with a 17th fastest lap in Singapore, but that was his only accolade in the three years with the current generation of F1 machinery.
Put to him that Ricciardo couldn’t get the most out of cars, Coulthard replied: “It’s an interesting one, because we often talk about certain cars not suiting certain drivers.
“f I ever look at my own career with the benefit of not being lost in the emotion of all the distractions, if you look at the setups, you had wide tracks, like narrow track grooves, three-and-a-half litres, all those different things that we had, I was always where I was meant to be – there or thereabouts on my best days, a little bit light on the average days.
“Therefore, if I just see life through my eyes when I hear a driver going, ‘Oh, this car doesn’t suit me’, does any car really suit a driver? The very best guys just take the best out of whatever the regulations are through the period of their career.
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