Helmut Marko continues to twist the knife in Daniel Ricciardo after culling Aussie
Daniel Ricciardo is now in F1 wilderness after being dropped by VCARB in Singapore.
Helmut Marko has commented that Daniel Ricciardo lost his ‘killer instinct’ during the latter stages of his F1 career, no longer attempting the late-braking manoeuvres that marked him out as a fierce competitor on the race track.
Ricciardo was afforded the chance to fight for a Red Bull seat with a full-time campaign with VCARB in 2024, but the popular Aussie scored points in just three of the first 18 Grands Prix of the season, leading Christian Horner and Marko to drop him after the race in Singapore last time out.
He has been replaced by Liam Lawson, who is seen as a potential future team-mate for Max Verstappen, leaving Ricciardo on the F1 bench with opportunities elsewhere drying up. After underwhelming stints at McLaren and VCARB, it appears his time on the grid is over.
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Discussing Ricciardo’s fall from grace in his Speedweek column, Marko explained: “He was given a second chance that no one else would have given him. And that was under the premise that a return to Red Bull Racing was possible if he performed well enough.
“The Racing Bulls team was always intended as a stopover. But the necessary performance only came twice, once with a fourth place in the sprint in Miami this year and last year in Mexico.
“But otherwise the speed was not there, and the consistency was not there either. The performance that would have justified a promotion to Red Bull Racing was missing. But that was the whole point of the whole thing.
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“If we knew why the performance wasn't as good as it should be, we would have done everything we could to change it. But the same killer instinct was no longer there. He was famous for his uncompromising overtaking, braking at the last point. But that was no longer the case either.”
Ricciardo was lucky that he even enjoyed 18 races in the VCARB seat this season. As revealed by Red Bull team principal Horner, Marko wanted to remove the 35-year-old after the Spanish Grand Prix, 10 rounds into the 2024 campaign.
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“Even around Barcelona, Helmut wanted him out of the car, and there was already a lot of pressure on him there,” Horner explained on the F1 Nation podcast. “But by the time we got to Montreal, it was actually dear old Jacques Villeneuve got him properly wound up, giving him a hard time.
“And it definitely fired him up because the way he drove the car that weekend, he grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and put together a very strong race weekend. So I said give Jacques a call every grand prix for the rest of the year, because whatever he said, it definitely worked.”
