Daniel Ricciardo zips up his blue and white windcheater. It’s Thursday at the Australian Grand Prix, and the glorious Melbourne sunshine drenching the paddock is beginning to lose the battle against the autumnal chill of the approaching twilight.
The Australian Formula 1 veteran has just finished signing autographs for a throng of fans, and Drive to Survive’s camera crew is stuck to him like glue, eavesdropping on his every word.
He takes a seat outside his RB team’s hospitality suite, pops open his smoothie shaker and smiles his famous toothy grin.
You’d never guess that Ricciardo was under pressure.
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We’re barely two races into the season but already questions are being asked about the eight-time race winner’s longevity at his newly rebranded team. Younger teammate Yuki Tsunoda had his number in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and though the campaign is long, Ricciardo’s implicit task had been to dominate the perennially underrated Japanese ace.
With Sergio Pérez performing with stubborn solidity and Liam Lawson pushing up from beneath for the seat he all but earnt last season, something at RB will have to give sooner or later.
“There’s no need to think long term right now,” Ricciardo coolly tells Fox Sports. “There’s no need to think about, ‘Oh, silly season, what’s going to happen there and if I have a good race here?’.
“That’s just more clutter and honestly shit that I don’t need to be thinking about.”
Formula 1 is a cutthroat business and Ricciardo has been here before — in fact he’s been well beyond the threshold of his current predicament.
“The sport was nearly gone for me,” he says. “I was nearly not ever racing again in this sport. That was definitely a possibility. So who knows what’s going to happen?
“Who knows how much longer this second chapter will be? I obviously want it to be a few years, but things can change and things happen quickly.
“I think for me being the best version of myself is about just being very, very present and not getting caught up in too much else.”
He takes a swig from his shaker. The Netflix boom operator adjusts their grip.
It wasn’t just that the sport was nearly gone for him; he was nearly gone for the sport.
Ricciardo’s McLaren spiral has become the stuff of Formula 1 folklore — a driver in his pomp finding almost exactly zero joy from a car no matter how hard he tried to understand its idiosyncrasies.
The immovable object beat the unstoppable force.
Mixed day for Aussies in Melbourne | 02:10
The driver who arrived back at Red Bull Racing as a hollowed-out reservist was drained of energy and sapped of morale. His spirit appeared broken.
It was difficult at the time to imagine him ever getting back in the cockpit, at least with a team with any meaningful pedigree to match his eight grand prix victories.
He knew too that he wasn’t ready. He needed work — but he needed to do it his way.
“Everyone’s got these days crazy theories and methods — ‘Oh, you should do this or do that’. Especially when things aren’t going well, everyone’s trying to chime in and get you to change what you’re doing,” he says.
“I had to change a few things that I was doing, but I needed just to go back to the basics, really. Back to having more accountability on me.
“It’s a complicated sport, but driving is not complicated when you’ve been doing it all your life.
“I don’t need to be doing crazy things. I just need to make sure that I’m arriving at the track, I’m fit, I’m hungry, I’m healthy, and that’s it.
“The first part of my career — I think that’s what I was trying to get back to. I didn’t need to reinvent the wheel.”
In stripping himself back to first racing principles, Ricciardo appeared to at least partially acknowledge a long-held criticism from some of his more trenchant critics — that he allowed himself to be too taken in by his own hype.
As Ricciardo’s star rose on the track in his peak Red Bull Racing years, his reputation burgeoned off it. The affable West Australian become one of Formula 1’s most identifiable names and most valuable brands, occupying more space in the public consciousness than some of the sport’s most decorated world champions.
But it’s hard to maintain growth off the track when the good times dry up on it. At very least it’s hard to justify its pursuit.
“I simplified a lot of things around me,” Ricciardo says. “I tried not to get too caught up in obviously off-track activities, because it is easy to do so with the way the sport is going and everyone’s trying to get a piece of you.
“I’m trying to keep that down as realistically as possible and just put racing first and foremost. It’s not that I wasn’t, but I’m doing a better job at it.
“I’m probably focusing more on myself, I would say, than trying to maybe also please others or do as others say.”
There’s joy to be found in the process.
Ricciardo had insisted this time last year that he would only contemplate a comeback to the grid in a frontrunning car. His compromise was to join RB, then AlphaTauri, with its direct connection to the dominant Red Bull Racing team and his old seat alongside Max Verstappen.
But then he was welcomed back to the Faenza factory, where he started his first full-time season in Formula 1 in 2012, like the prodigal son returning home, and the parameters of the transaction changed.
There was purpose beyond the end goal. Team and driver needed each other equally, and Ricciardo found a new satisfaction in becoming an elder statesman and an off-track leader for a squad that has traditionally fielded only inexperienced drivers since being sold to Red Bull in 2006.
“I think it was all part of my happiness and motivation — everything — coming back last year,” he says. “I was happy doing all of it.
“I was happy driving but I was also happy spending the time with the engineers, trying to problem solve. I could feel that the team was very, receptive, quite excited about the questions I was asking or the direction I was trying to suggest.
“I certainly felt like I was bringing good value to the team, and that was exciting.”
Together they conjured the first glimpse of the old Daniel Ricciardo in all his swashbuckling glory.
“Obviously my fourth race in, being Mexico, we put a last-in-the-constructors car on the second row of the grid, That was exciting, and I felt very fulfilled,” he recalls. “I’m not saying obviously that was all me, but we got to a place where we entered that weekend with quite a bit optimism.
“That’s been fun for me, and that’s where I’m at now with this team. I want to keep trying to do that.
“Obviously I have to produce the lap time as well, but I’m finding a lot of happiness in building a better team and hopefully a better race car for both me and Yuki.”
Which brings us back to present day.
Red Bull squander one-two finish | 00:49
The simplified, back-to-basics Ricciardo is engaged in a do-or-die season for his career. While there’s the carrot of a potential dream Red Bull Racing drive, both he and Tsunoda know the vanquished in their exclusive one-on-one battle is almost certain to lose their seat.
In Ricciardo’s case that would mean another dice with retirement, this time probably permanent.
The season has started poorly for the Australian. He’s yet to beat Tsunoda in qualifying this year, and he’s set to line up for today’s Australian Grand Prix a painful 18th, 10 places behind Tsunoda in another giant-killing top-10 performance.
Having pegged this weekend’s race as the one at which he wanted to bounce back, Ricciardo will start his first home grand prix in two years as the last car on the grid.
It’s a far, far cry from the desire to return to the front of the field.
“I would say perspective and things change,” he says, speaking before Saturday’s disastrous qualifying. “As much as I’m putting in every bit of effort to make this second opportunity work, I also don’t carry the weight anymore — maybe because it was nearly gone, so I’m just very appreciative of this second chance.
“It’s not that I take a lightly, but I’m just very comfortable in my skin and know what’s expected of me.
“I want to find myself back on the podium. I want to be fighting at the front. The truth is fighting at the front is better. It’s more fun. I just feel more comfortable as well fighting at the front.
“Even I go back to Monza [in 2021] when I was leading, I was just very calm and comfortable and happy in the lead. I wasn’t sweating, I wasn’t stressing. It was my happy place. I know it’s easy to say, but I do feel definitely more at home there.
“But to get back there I need to get the most out of what I’ve got here. Maybe that’s points — whatever it is — but I need to help my situation by doing well here.
“But also the team benefits. The more I work here, the more the team grows and gets better and maybe we end up finding ourselves on the podium in this team.”
If he fails, some will wonder whether he should have faded out of the sport after leaving McLaren.
Certainly it would have been easy to call it a day and allow his legacy to rest on having amassed eight victories, having entered more grands prix than all but 12 drivers in F1 history and having earnt more money than he could ever have imagined when he set out from Perth almost two decades ago to chase his dream.
That, however, misses the point.
“The racer in me I feel is very much still there and very much still the same,” he says. “Ultimately that competitor is still very much the same.
“Competitiveness is DNA. Pure competition goes beyond ego.
“If I put my mind to it and I put energy and effort into it, I back myself to a point where I believe I can be better than whoever I’m going against.
“When it doesn’t work out, it angers me, but then it does motivate me to try and work harder.
“I think that’s why I’ve learnt a lot from my lows and my bad days. I haven’t just buried my head in a pillow and forgot about it; I try to work at it to find an answer and be better.
“I’ll try and go out and do it, and I believe I can do it more often than not.
“I’ve just got to do it.”
The final chapter of Ricciardo’s F1 career is yet to be written as he rises from the table and Netflix stops recording.
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