Formula 1 decision from 2018 seems to have backfired

Daniel Ricciardo made the decision to leave Red Bull after the 2018 Formula 1 season, a decision that was and still is a baffling one.

If there is one driver whose performance through the first eight races of the 23-race 2021 Formula 1 season has been an unpleasant surprise, it is McLaren’s Daniel Ricciardo.

Ricciardo has long been considered one of the most talented drivers in Formula 1, one who has never truly gotten the opportunity to pilot championship-caliber machinery.

But his start to the 2021 season has been quite disastrous.

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McLaren sit in third place in the constructor standings, and Lando Norris has been a major part of that, sitting in fourth in the driver standings with two podium finishes and five additional top five finishes. He has scored 86 points.

But Ricciardo only sits in ninth place in the driver standings without a single top five finish. He has only beaten Norris in one race, and Norris has more top five finishes than Ricciardo has top 10 finishes. Ricciardo has scored just 34 points and sits behind drivers from two teams that trail McLaren in the standings.

The 32-year-old Australian has struggled to adapt to the MCL35M and has not truly maximized on the potential of the car that is clearly McLaren’s best since quite a few years before the V6 turbo hybrid era began in 2014.

So let’s take a brief trip back to August 2018, when Ricciardo, driving for Red Bull, made what made considered — and still consider — to be a baffling decision to leave the team following the conclusion of the 2018 season.

Poor reliability had plagued Ricciardo throughout the 2017 and 2018 seasons, causing him 12 retirements in 41 races. Red Bull had already announced a switch to Honda engines, which had had their own reliability issues at the time, for the 2019 season.

Additionally, it was clear that Red Bull planned for Max Verstappen, then just 20 years old, to be their top driver for the foreseeable future. That has indeed come to fruition.

So while Red Bull wanted Ricciardo to stay, he ultimately factored in what he thought was everything and made the decision to leave for Renault for the 2019 season.

But Ricciardo only spent two seasons with Renault, including the shortened 2020 season. In fact, he had only spent one year with the team when he made the decision to jump ship and make the move to McLaren for 2021. This announcement was made even before the 2020 season began.

Ricciardo ended up finishing in fifth place in the 2020 driver standings, which is higher than where he finished in his final season with Red Bull in 2018, with two podium finishes, matching his podium finish total from 2018. His average finish of 7.5 was batter that his average finishes in  both 2017 (8.0) and 2018 (9.3).

So while he wasn’t in race-winning machinery, he was still making the most of what turned out to be quite a solid opportunity.

And now that solid opportunity is behind him as well.

Now he finds himself struggling in a car that Norris has proven is capable of so much more, and whenever a bit of progress seems to be made, he seems to take a step back. While the switch could certainly flip at any moment, there have been no indicators thus far than an end to the struggle is truly in sight.

Meanwhile, Red Bull are leading the constructor standings for the first time since they won their fourth consecutive title in 2013, and they are doing so with Verstappen atop the driver standings. No Red Bull driver had led the standings since Sebastian Vettel won his fourth straight title in 2013 as well.

With four wins, including two in a row in three in the last four races (would be four in a row if not for a dramatic tire failure), so far this season, Verstappen has taken on the role of world championship favorite, ahead of even four-time reigning and seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton of seven-time reigning constructor champions Mercedes.

Ricciardo has said that he couldn’t see himself at Red Bull now, even if he had decided to return to the team for the 2021 season.

"“I got asked the other day, looking at Red Bull this year, looking like they can fight for a championship, do you think you still would have been there. I said even if I hadn’t moved that year, if I had stayed with Red Bull instead of Renault, by now I would have moved. I couldn’t have seen myself spending another three years there. Regardless of whether I went to Renault or not, I still didn’t see myself at Red Bull in 2021.”"

But we’ll never know for sure, will we?

Red Bull weren’t championship contenders in 2019 or 2020, so it’s very possible that Ricciardo would have walked away after one of those two seasons like he said.

However, Verstappen finished behind only the Mercedes duo of Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas in the driver standings in both of those two seasons, and the 2021 season marks the first time since Ricciardo left that the Milton Keynes-based team have had a sense of stability in their second car, with Sergio Perez now behind the wheel.

Pierre Gasly struggled in 2019 before he was replaced mid-season by Alexander Albon, who struggled throughout the rest of the 2019 season and throughout the 2020 season before he was replaced by Perez.

So had Ricciardo opted to stay in the second car for the team which he had been with since 2014 in both 2019 and 2020, perhaps things would have been different, possibly even in the form of consistent podium finishes.

But again, we’ll never know for sure, will we?

Either way, given where Ricciardo and Red Bull are now, the seven-time Grand Prix winner’s 2018 decision is all the more baffling, and it appears to have backfired.