Pretty Shit: An Honest Conversation about Daniel Ricciardo at McLaren
When asked to assess his overall performance this season, Ricciardo responded, “I wouldn’t give myself too much of a flattering grade, but I don’t want to say what I think! Because that just makes me sound pretty shit.”
He settled on a mark of five-out-of-ten, but is that overly harsh, or perhaps too lenient?
Joining a burgeoning McLaren outfit on the back of a remarkably consistent, double podium-tattoo-bet winning season with Renault, finishing 5th in the World Championship on 119 points, there’s little doubt that expectations – both internally and externally – were incredibly high, for what appears on paper as a near-perfect driver and team combination.
Fast forward 11 races, and Daniel sits 9th in the standing on 50 points, pacing respectably with the 51 earned by Carlos Sainz to this point last season, occupying the same seat at McLaren.
Not so bad, eh?
Well, across the papaya-drenched garage, a herculean effort from Lando Norris has the 21-year-old Brit only trailing runaway title favourites Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen, in 3rd place on 113 points, behind a trio of podiums at Imola, Monaco, and Spielberg, with eight finishes in the top five, a feat which Ricciardo has only reached once.
Oh.
That 63-point hole between Norris and Ricciardo would claim 8th by itself, and just 20 points (or fewer) behind both Ferrari drivers, McLaren’s main rivals this season, and the team which they’re currently tied with for 3rd in the Constructors, at 163 points.
Perhaps more worrying for Ricciardo is exactly why this gap has opened, and exponentially grown throughout the season, especially given his lack of major mistakes or DNF-inducing mechanical failures on a Grand Prix, driving one of just five cars on the grid to complete every race.
The answer is nearly a third of a second, 0.331 to be precise, which likely just passed multiple times by reading this sentence, but it’s a fractional eternity in motorsport, and the average time differential between Norris and Ricciardo on a Saturday.
Lando has out-qualified Daniel 8-3, currently amidst a 7-0 stretch since Monaco, where the gap is actually more than half-a-second at 0.563, and would register as the single biggest pace disparity in Formula 1.
“The results aren’t through a lack of trying. And I certainly feel like I’ve put in the work. I think it will eventually come to fruition, and it will show.”
Comparatively, Valtteri Bottas – much maligned for his performance at Mercedes – also trails Hamilton 3-8, however by over a tenth less (0.197), whilst Sergio Perez cedes 0.452 to five-time pole sitter Verstappen, yet removing an outlier in Bahrain, records exactly (0.331) the Norris-Ricciardo number over the last ten races.
That figure equates to an average grid position of 6.09 for Norris, whilst Ricciardo registers a meagre 10.55, and has failed to qualify for the top-ten shootout at over half of the Grand Prix this season.
Simply put, Daniel is struggling to piece together a complete weekend in the McLaren.
This issue of consistency from session-to-session, and the abundantly clear pace differential between cars, is leaving Ricciardo with far too much ground to make up on a Sunday afternoon, as Daniel gets bogged in the DRS trains of the midfield scrap, Lando can – rather successfully – contest the leading Mercedes and Red Bull cars off the line.
At no Grand Prix was this more apparent than Monaco - a circuit where Ricciardo has picked up one (and should’ve had another) victory, two pole positions and four podiums – and saw Daniel qualify almost an entire second behind Lando, before being lapped by him in the race.
Admittedly, that was aided by a short track-time, near-impossibility to overtake, loathed inability of modern cars to follow closely, and the multi-second disadvantages of blue flags, yet nevertheless the significance of being over a minute and twenty seconds behind your closest rival using the exact same machinery does underscore the significant gulf in performance between the two this season.
Ultimately, none of this makes easy reading for the Ricciardo faithful, but it’s tremendously difficult to overlook the fact that Daniel – quite frankly – hasn’t been himself this season.
“We do see progress step-by-step and we also see the race craft of Daniel, which is very complete. So if anything, the key bit we need to add at the moment is that little bit of speed”
Whilst this presents grounds for legitimate criticism of Ricciardo, rather than forming frivolous narratives about his seat being under threat at McLaren for 2022, it’s far more productive to consider the underlying factors that may help explain why Daniel has struggled to find his footing, and how these may indicate a reversal of fortunes over the remainder of this season.
Foremost, it shouldn’t be overlooked that Ricciardo has been dropped into a McLaren car with a Mercedes engine, and a considerably different aerodynamic package to those which the Australian has become accustomed to over his last seven seasons with Renault and Red Bull.
Evidently, those systems have been steadily developed with feedback from – then meticulously molded around – the driving style and preferences of Norris, over his past three seasons with the team, and perhaps even stretching back to young drivers tests in 2017 and 2018.
Speaking on this, the team’s Racing Director Andrea Stella observed, “He came to McLaren, in terms of driving characteristics, I would say from the opposite end. Daniel is a driver who likes to roll the speed into the corner, not necessarily attack the braking as much as our car requires.”
Ricciardo himself added, "It's mainly about corner entry and balance. I won't lie, the car is very sensitive. That's the really frustrating thing because you need a certain driving style to do it and if you don't have that, then you're not fast enough."
Only further compounding this unfamiliarity, the FIA substantially condensed pre-season testing programs for 2021 – by half, from six to just three days in Barcelona – whilst also shaving an hour from free practice on race weekends, considerably compromising the amount of time Daniel has actually spent on track, to get more comfortable in the car, and rectify some of these issues.
Commenting on his difficulties to adapt, Ricciardo noted, “My strength over the years has been my sensitivity, and I’m good at ‘feeling’ the car, but I don’t necessarily know that I’m entirely comfortable with what I feel with this car, so I’m still searching for that. If you can feel what the car is doing, know what it’s going to do, that lifts your confidence as you feel you can push it to the limit. I don’t have that feel for where the limit is, so my confidence is down from where it should be. The margins are so small that if you’re off confidence-wise, you’re nowhere.”
In response to Ricciardo, McLaren have purportedly made minor refinements, and multiple setup adjustments to find more common ground between substance and skillset, however Stella admits, “We clearly see what the issues are that Daniel is also describing, and that has nothing to do with parts. It has to do with characteristics of our car, and in the end it's a combination of Daniel still getting used to our car, but at the same time he also has a teammate that is in an unbelievable vein of form, and that's why we see this gap from time to time.”
At this point, you must consider that perhaps the true narrative isn’t strictly about Ricciardo struggling to acclimatise at McLaren, so much as it should be recognising a marvelously overachieving half-season from Norris.
For as much as Ricciardo may be underwhelming expectations at McLaren, Lando has exceeded them ten-fold, particularly to be leading Bottas and Perez, but especially Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc at Ferrari by over 30 points.
Of course, Formula 1 inherently compares teammates as their most immediate rival, yet remove Lando from the equation, and Daniel appears to have had a much more solid run of form, with eight points finishes from 11 races which arguably could’ve been ten if not for a momentary loss of power in Austria, and floor damage sustained on the first lap in Hungary.
“I’ve been trying to use different kind of analogies to explain to the outside world to try and get the words across...my instinct is obviously to kick a ball with my right foot, and that’s easy, but now to really perfect this car I’m trying to learn how to kick with my left, that’s maybe a good analogy.”
In fact, erase his uncontrollable first corner spin at the Hungaroring, Ricciardo likely emerges from the carnage Steven Bradbury-style behind Hamilton – who ultimately didn’t pit before the race-restart – and suddenly the number three McLaren would’ve been leading the Grand Prix, instead of eventual first-time race-winner Esteban Ocon.
If Budapest had been witness to the first podium-shoey of the season, nobody would’ve been talking about Daniel struggling anymore.
Regardless, there is absolutely weight to the premise that Norris rather spectacularly – and unexpectedly – demolishing Ricciardo is heaping the pressure on Daniel to produce similar results.
Obviously, the major hurdle is qualifying, and Ricciardo knows he’ll need to improve on the margins to lighten his work for the races – which have actually been underrated somewhat, given his average finish position of 8.3 is over two places ahead of its quali-counterpart.
It’s clear that the undisputed raw talent of a seven-time race winner isn’t suddenly lost overnight, and it’s only because of those lofty standards that an otherwise perfectly solid points-scoring start – unquestionably better than his initial performances at Renault - could be seen as such a disappointment.
Arguably, Ricciardo’s move to McLaren was never about the 2021 season anyway, instead betting on the papaya horse to bolt out of the blocks under the proposed 2022 regulation changes, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see the Ricciardo of old, flip the switch after the summer break and suddenly matching Lando, taking the fight to Ferrari and potentially contending for podiums.
After his exceptional climb-through-the-field triumph at the 2018 Chinese Grand Prix, Ricciardo infamously noted that “Sometimes you’ve just got to lick the stamp and send it…”
It’s mail time.
