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In a Formula 1 season of frustrations and below-expectation performances, Daniel Ricciardo’s forgettable Dutch Grand Prix did not bring his outright worst results.
His lowly grid position of 17th at least bettered 18th place in Bahrain. Finishing where he started was one place better than where he ended up at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.
So, he escapes this being the worst weekend of 2022 – in terms of headline results – by a whisker. But there the silver linings end.
Ricciardo has tended to offer the most honest appraisals of his struggles this season and after Sunday’s race he wasn’t shying away from how bad it’s been this year, and where the Dutch GP fits into that.
“I feel like there’s been a lot of bad ones,” he said of his season. “So…if I say it’s the worst, then…pfff. I didn’t think it could get worse.
“It’s weird as well. Because I think back to FP1 and I remember, the first few laps of the session, Tom [Stallard, race engineer] was like, ‘All right, that’s P1’, I was like, ‘All right’, even if not everyone’s set a time, I thought it was trending to be a much better weekend.
“And that’s where it’s a weird one – I know qualifying got away from us through the last corner, but I felt like we were looking like a much better car, in a better place, at the first practice session.
“So, yeah, it’s tough to say. But certainly not a good weekend.”
In a car as competitive as the McLaren, even a driver struggling for form isn’t going to post 17th places for no reason – but unsurprisingly, all of Ricciardo’s worst results this season have caveats attached.
McLaren was a mess in Bahrain and Ricciardo was recovering from a bout of COVID-19 that forced him to miss the pre-season test there the week before. At Imola, Ricciardo’s race was wrecked by a first-corner clash with Carlos Sainz that dropped him to the back.
And there was some ill-fortune in qualifying at Zandvoort, as Ricciardo alluded to. He was going to progress to Q2 but encountered dirt on the track at the final corner, which slowed him down and forced a Q1 knockout.
The qualifying and race results would not have been as damning without that. But they would probably not have been transformational. Ricciardo was only going to scrape through to Q2, as he was already three tenths down on team-mate Lando Norris before the final sector (in which he lost more than two tenths compared to Norris, perhaps because he encountered the worst of the dirt on track).
It was always going to be difficult for Ricciardo to make progress in the race, struggling for pace himself and driving a car that isn’t super-competitive on the straights.
After an awkward first lap, the only time Ricciardo gained a place outside of the pitstops was when Kevin Magnussen went off on lap two. He was passed by both Haas drivers around mid-race and only ran ahead of Nicholas Latifi for the final 30 laps.
Within this was a genuine Ricciardo low point with McLaren. Based on positions at the end of each lap, he never ran higher than 16th in that race, even through the pitstops. That’s never happened in his McLaren career and the last time it happened was with Renault in Australia in 2019, when he broke his front wing at the start.
Next up is Monza, the scene of Ricciardo’s victory in 2021 and the source of months of hope that Ricciardo could crack it at McLaren. That hope was finally extinguished when McLaren decided it wanted to replace Ricciardo for 2023 and Ricciardo admitted there’ll be some “weird feelings coming back, maybe some happy-sad feelings because it was such a big moment last year, but I think we’re in a different position this year”.
There is no reason to expect anything close to a repeat result. Points are even a luxury now. Ricciardo has four top 10 finishes in 15 races this year, his last being ninth place in France in July. But Ricciardo, true to form, is not throwing in the towel.
Asked if he wanted to head home to Australia, Ricciardo said he would need that escape at the end of the season – but not now.
“I do want to be at the next seven races, you know? I do want to show up and I do want to get to Monza with the energy I know I can show and the result I know I can get,” he said.
“I definitely don’t want to buy that ticket now. I think by the end of the season for sure I will want to just switch off and spend some time home. But I’m not ready for it yet.
“It has been at times uncomfortable, the last couple weekends [following the news of his early McLaren exit]. But I’m not really ready to just go and hide and close the door yet.
“I also don’t want to go out on a 17th place or something like that. I’m going to keep fighting through it.
“Fortunately I love combat sports and I’m used to watching and supporting fighters who get knocked down and get back up, so I’m trying to put myself in that position now.”
