“Don’t set the bar too high”: Daniel Ricciardo reveals what Oscar Piastri has to do to succeed at McLaren

Daniel Ricciardo had a two-year nightmare stint with McLaren which came to an end after the 2022 Abu Dhabi GP. Midway into the season, the Woking squad announced that the 33-year-old would leave them after the campaign and that Oscar Piastri would be his replacement.

Piastri is a huge talent in motorsport, and his entry into F1 was seen only as a matter of time. The 2021 F2 Champion spent a year on the sidelines as an Alpine reserve and the majority of the F1 community felt that his future lay with the French outfit. However, in a shocking turn of events, he denied joining them after Fernando Alonso’s exit was made official. Instead, he signed a contract with McLaren to replace fellow compatriot Ricciardo.

Ricciardo will not be a full-time driver in F1 in 2023. The Aussie failed to land a seat with a top team and did not want to drive for a backmarker. That is why he chose the reserve driver opening at his former team Red Bull, and will return to the Milton-Keynes outfit.

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Daniel Ricciardo tells Oscar Piastri what he has to do at McLaren

Ricciardo’s move to McLaren in 2021 generated a lot of excitement. His partnership with Lando Norris was promising on paper, but he ended up getting comprehensively outperformed by the Brit. Ricciardo’s stint in Surrey did not go according to plan. However, now that he passes the baton to Piastri, he has some words of advice for him.

The Perth-born driver gave a piece of very simple advice to Piastri: to ‘just go out there and drive’. He urged the 21-year-old to not be very hard on himself and asked him to judge his performances one race at a time.

“I know that sounds like a really lazy response,” Ricciardo said during the latest episode of the Beyond the Grid podcast. “But go out and drive. Learn, be a sponge, but drive. Don’t set the bar too high for yourself. If you end up doing better than maybe what you thought, awesome, but just take it race by race.”

Ricciardo had a very underwhelming final season in F1 (for now). He finished P11 with just 37 points to his name, 85 points behind his teammate who finished seventh.

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