Ricciardo’s fate sealed in Baku crash, not Renault move
It was the high-speed crash that forever altered Daniel Ricciardo’s Formula One career.
Ricciardo, desperately trying to cling on to his status as Red Bull’s lead driver, and a young upshot in Max Verstappen trying to assert his authority.
Questions will forever be asked of Ricciardo’s decision to leave Red Bull at the end of 2018, and what role that played in his career officially being ended this week.
But in reality, the seeds for Ricciardo’s demise were sown on the main straight of the Baku City Circuit at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix months earlier.
Until that point, Ricciardo could still lay some claim to being Red Bull’s top priority.
He had bettered the team’s initial golden boy Sebastian Vettel on his arrival in 2014, and outscored Verstappen in both 2016 and 2017.
By 2018, though, it was clear Verstappen was a world champion in the making.
And when the two banged wheels multiple times in Baku in 2018 and Ricciardo eventually ran up the back of Verstappen at the end of the main straight, the dynamic forever changed.
Both drivers were reprimanded by race stewards and considered equally at fault, but Verstappen emerged as the winner in the Red Bull power struggle.
Ricciardo would win again a few races later in Monaco, but Verstappen beat his teammate to the line in 14 of 17 races from Azerbaijan on.
And so, when the chance came for Ricciardo to take the gamble of moving away from the Red Bull juggernaut to a factory team in Renault, it at least had some merit.
Ricciardo, for his part, has never regretted the move.
“You live and you learn, but I don’t look back with regret,” he said in a 2022 interview.
“I don’t look back and say, ‘Man, I shouldn’t have (left)’. Obviously at the time I felt like it was right for me.
“I can be honest with myself and say, ‘Yeah, I took a little bit of a gamble on myself’.”
Perhaps his shift to McLaren for 2021 was the greater error, given he returned to the podium again at Renault in late 2020 after making the call.
And while he ended McLaren’s six-year drought with a shock win at Monza in 2021, it was never a happy marriage.
Ousted for Oscar Piastri at the Woking-based team last year, a lifeline eventually came at Red Bull’s sister team RB.
Ricciardo had dreamed of a return to the main outfit, but when Red Bull retained the struggling Sergio Perez during the European summer break this year, the writing was on the wall.
Moved on by RB on Thursday, Ricciardo finishes as Australia’s fourth most successful driver in terms of wins with eight.
It’s likely he could have had many more as Verstappen’s No.2 at Red Bull, given the team’s dominance with the past three drivers’ championships.
But in reality, from the moment of his collision in Baku, Ricciardo’s fate was sealed and a world championship at Red Bull was impossible.
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