Daniel Ricciardo’s promising-looking move to McLaren in 2021 soon turned into a nightmare, with his initial three-year deal being cut short to two. His driving suffered, and results deteriorated, which Red Bull boss Christian Horner felt was McLaren’s fault.
Tom Stallard, who was Ricciardo’s race engineer at the Woking-based team, however, disagrees with Horner’s comments. He appeared on the F1 Beyond the Grid Podcast recently, where he was asked to address Horner’s claims that Ricciardo had picked up ‘bad habits’ in Woking. According to the Red Bull team principal, Ricciardo had to work hard on the simulator to get rid of those.
When the host of the podcast Tom Clarkson asked Stallard about this, the British race engineer denied it. He also insisted that there was nothing wrong with the way Ricciardo was driving the car.
“I would say actually that Daniel was driving the car very normally. And if anything, our car required some quite specific actions…” he said.
️ “Give me a winning car and I’ll win!”
Daniel Ricciardo discussed his continued struggles at McLaren, but insists he still has more to give F1 pic.twitter.com/TlYMBjp8Wa
— Sky Sports F1 (@SkySportsF1) July 24, 2022
Stallard suggested that Ricciardo did the best with the car at his disposal. However, it was not enough to impress McLaren or make himself feel confident about his abilities.
Ricciardo came into McLaren as one of F1’s top drivers — poised to take the papaya squad back to the top. But in his two-year stay, he was forced to play second fiddle to Lando Norris (his teammate) because of his underwhelming performances.
Despite the same, Stallard claimed on the podcast, “I don’t think he left the team with bad habits”. However, Ricciardo had to adapt his driving in a ‘certain way’ to try and get the best out of the challenger.
Ricciardo left McLaren at the end of the 2022 season, only to return to Red Bull as a reserve. He soon got back to the grid with RB (Red Bull’s sister team) but lost his place on the grid once again last month.
Whether it was his McLaren stint or there were other factors at play, Ricciardo’s last few years in F1 don’t do justice to the phenom he was on track during his peak Red Bull days (2014-2018) when he won seven races for the Milton-Keynes-based squad.
