The failed Daniel Ricciardo ‘stopover’ plan after ‘fairytale ending’ denied

Helmut Marko has confirmed that Red Bull Racing planned to re-sign Daniel Ricciardo after his F1 2023 comeback, with his VCARB stint “only ever intended as a stopover.”

Red Bull announced last week that Ricciardo had been dropped by VCARB, with reserve driver Liam Lawson stepping in for the final six races of the F1 2024 season.

Helmut Marko: Red Bull planned to bring Daniel Ricciardo back after VCARB ‘stopover’

It came after Ricciardo appeared to contest his last F1 race at the Singapore Grand Prix, where he was treated to a guard of honour in the paddock as speculation surrounding his future intensified.

PlanetF1.com revealed last week that Ricciardo has been offered the chance to maintain his ties with Red Bull with an ambassador-style role, but is yet to accept the proposal.

Ricciardo enjoyed the most successful stint of his F1 career with Red Bull’s senior team, collecting all but one of his eight career victories between 2014 and 2018 before spells with Renault and McLaren.

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The Australian made no secret of his desire to reclaim his former seat alongside Max Verstappen following his return to the grid with VCARB (then AlphaTauri) in 2023, conceding in Singapore that “the fairytale ending didn’t happen.”

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner revealed this week that Marko had been pushing for Ricciardo to be dropped since the Spanish Grand Prix in June.

After that race, Marko publicly revealed that Red Bull shareholders had expressed a desire for VCARB to return to its Toro Rosso roots as a team to train young drivers, a strategy likely to leave no place for 35-year-old Ricciardo.

Writing in his Speedweek column, Marko defended the decision to drop Ricciardo as well as Red Bull’s handling of the situation in Singapore, where the veteran was left to field questions over his future with no announcement forthcoming.

And he confirmed that Red Bull had intended to bring him back to the senior team – almost certainly as a replacement for Sergio Perez – if his comeback proved a success, with Ricciardo’s largely mediocre performances since 2023 preventing the team from putting the plan into action.

Marko said: “Daniel Ricciardo’s departure was only announced after the race weekend in Singapore for compelling reasons relating to commercial agreements.

“He himself was informed in good time and – to put it in his own words – he is at peace with himself.

“I also think that the fastest race lap he set [in the final laps in Singapore] was a worthy farewell performance.

“He was given a second chance that nobody else would have given him. And this was done on the premise that a return to Red Bull Racing is possible if his performance is up to scratch.

“The Racing Bulls [VCARB] team was therefore only ever intended as a stopover.

“But the necessary performance only flashed up twice, once with a fourth place in the Miami sprint this year and last year in Mexico.

“But apart from that, the speed wasn’t there and the consistency wasn’t there either.

“The whole performance that would have justified a promotion to Red Bull Racing was missing, but that was the purpose of the whole thing.

“If we knew why the performance wasn’t up to scratch, then we would have done everything we could to change that.

“But the same killer instinct was simply no longer recognisable.

“He was famous for his uncompromising overtaking, for braking at the last point, but that was no longer the case either.”

Ricciardo was linked with a return to Red Bull as recently as July after an alarming mid-season slump for Perez, who remains without a podium finish since the Chinese Grand Prix in April.

PlanetF1.com understands that a clause in the new two-year contract Perez signed in June gave Red Bull the freedom to drop the Mexican driver over the summer break as he was in excess of 100 points behind team-mate Verstappen in the Drivers’ standings.

It is thought that Perez came exceptionally close to being replaced after the Belgian Grand Prix, the final race ahead of the summer break, before the decision was made 24 hours later to keep both him and Ricciardo in place entering the second half of the season.

It is unclear if Perez’s renewed deal contains a similar mechanism that would allow Red Bull to drop him at the end of F1 2024, with the 34-year-old’s deficit to Verstappen currently standing at 187 points.

Despite promoting Lawson to a race seat for the rest of F1 2024, VCARB stopped short of confirming the New Zealander for next season, sparking suggestions that Lawson could yet emerge as a serious alternative to Perez for F1 2025.

Horner, who has spoken of a “bigger picture” behind Red Bull’s driver swap, hinted this week that Lawson could be considered for a rapid promotion to a Red Bull seat with a strong end to F1 2024.

He told the F1 Nation podcast: “This goes beyond VCARB. It encompasses Red Bull Racing.

“Obviously, we’ve got a contract with Sergio for next year, but you’ve always got to have an eye out in terms of what comes next?

“And is that going to be Liam? Or do we need to look outside the pool?”

Asked to outline his “ideal scenario” ahead of next season, he added: “That obviously Checo [Perez] finds his form and rediscovers the shape that he was in at the beginning of the year and nothing changes.

“But as we know in this business, two weeks is long term.”

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