- Daniel Ricciardo says he wishes he had stayed at Red Bull instead of taking the Renault offer he accepted in 2018, per Motorsport.com.
- The 37-year-old says he spent months hiding humiliation and sadness after Racing Bulls replaced him following the 2024 Singapore Grand Prix.
- He says he would entertain a one-off Le Mans 24 Hours with Max Verstappen to finish his racing career on his own terms.
The One Unknown and the Ending He Still Wants
Daniel Ricciardo kept the short answer for the end of a long one. Asked on the F1 Beyond The Grid podcast whether he regrets leaving Red Bull, he said: “If I’m to answer it shortly, yes, I wish I would have stayed, but…”
Then he slowed down. He said he left when he felt “a bit comfortable, a bit complacent” after a decade inside the Red Bull family. “I think there was a desire to try something else,” he said. “It’s not that black and white.”
The same conversation went much further than one career decision. Ricciardo talked about the months after his Formula 1 career ended, about the happy face he put on in public, and about a door he has now opened to one last race.
The Renault Offer That Reshaped a Career
In July 2018, Ricciardo ranked among the most highly rated drivers in the paddock. He had spent a decade with Red Bull, from his early junior single-seater days, and he led the brand’s effort in the world championship. He had won two grands prix in the first half of that season. Renault had not managed a finish better than fifth in those same months.
Cyril Abiteboul arrived with a Renault deal, and Ricciardo took it. The gamble did not pay off. He finished 2019 without a single podium, and McLaren beat Renault to fourth place in the constructors’ championship. Before the 2020 season had even started, delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, he signed with McLaren for 2021.
Ricciardo struggled at McLaren, with one shock exception: he won the 2021 Italian Grand Prix. McLaren dropped him at the end of 2022, with fellow Australian Oscar Piastri taking his place. A comeback with Red Bull’s junior team in the middle of 2023 ran into a broken hand, then inconsistent results. Liam Lawson replaced him after the 2024 Singapore Grand Prix.
Meanwhile Max Verstappen, his old Red Bull garage mate, kept climbing and took four consecutive world titles with the team Ricciardo had left of his own choice. Verstappen would later be reported to have kept his exit door open in contract talks of his own.
Ricciardo hints at more behind the call than the public ever saw. “If I tell you everything that went on, it was wild,” he said.
Respect for Max, No Claim to Beat Him
The obvious follow-up is whether he would have been champion. Ricciardo would not say it. “I definitely don’t want to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I would have been world champion if I stayed’,” he said. He said claiming he would have beaten Verstappen would be “maybe a bit unfair”. “Max has gone on to prove he is one of the best ever,” Ricciardo said. “Obviously I respect him a lot.”
He also gave a plain answer about the title chance itself. “If I could have been a world champion, was that my best opportunity? Yes, absolutely,” he said. “I would have loved to have known another reality of if I stayed.”
Verstappen has said he was closer to quitting F1 than leaving Red Bull. Ricciardo stays curious about what might have been. “I don’t want to say it haunts me, but it’s the one unknown that I’m like, ‘Hmm, I’m so interested how that would have panned out’,” he said.
Ricciardo also named the doubt that sits beside the curiosity. “There’s also a reality where Max kept getting better, kept getting momentum, and I don’t know” and then he asked himself: “would I have kept lifting? It’s hard to say,” he said.
He refused to sell himself short, either. “I won some races that 2018 year, I got a pole. I was still very capable, so I’m not doubting my abilities to have kept competing with Max,” he said. He agreed that the years after the move were rough. He closed the answer with a concession: “If you want to call it regret or curiosity or whatever, then I will say yes.”
Hiding From Humiliation
The sharper half of the interview turned to the months after Racing Bulls made its call. Ricciardo, a West Australian who began his Formula 1 career with HRT in 2011 and finished it with eight grand prix wins and 32 podiums from 257 starts, did not get to finish the 2024 season. He struggled to accept that.
“Not performing to the level I needed to at the time or not being able to finish out the season or whatever, it’s then a sense of humiliation, like I failed and I didn’t do what I once could,” he said.
In public, he kept the act going. “People saw me out in public, I was ‘haha and having a good time’, having a drink or whatever and I was just really hiding from what I really felt deep inside, which was a lot of pain and sadness,” he said. He put the loss plainly. “I was once this kid hoping to fight for a world title and obviously winning races but now it’s gone.”
He described those months in one line. “I was just hiding from humiliation.”
This was not the first time he had wanted out. After the 2022 Monaco Grand Prix, he said, he sat in his apartment and told his team he was finished. “I’m sitting in my apartment talking to the team and I was like ‘guys I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m done’,” he said. Silverstone in 2015 was another time he felt that way. “There are moments where I’ve wanted to just get away from it,” Ricciardo said.
He also described the voices around him. “You have people around you who tell you you’re great, tell you you can still do it and you end up also believing a lot of these voices,” he said. He said he would probably have kept racing. “I think that I would have probably just continued and maybe I’d still be racing and that’s also a scary thought,” he said. He is grateful the team made the call, and he still says: “I still don’t like how it ended.”
The move away from racing came with rough days. Ricciardo has spent more time with family and friends in Perth, works with Ford Racing as a global ambassador and keeps developing his Enchanté fashion brand. He helped on his family’s farm. Back in everyday routines, he reassessed relationships that had received less attention in his racing years. Some days he struggled to find a sense of purpose without a racing calendar to organize his life.
Then came a crash. In August last year, two hours into a planned 10-day trip with friends in north Queensland, he came off a motorbike. He went to hospital by road and then flew to Brisbane for surgery. The trip “sadly didn’t last long”, he said, and “my enthusiasm outrode my talent.” He added: “I don’t know why I’m smiling, it was a very dark moment.” He described the emotional hurt as bigger than the physical pain, and said he was angry and sad with himself. He added that by August he was in a much better place than earlier in the year, and that he was quite grateful, maybe, that it happened then and not at the start of the year.
A Last Chapter on His Own Terms
He first pulled back from the sport. Then he attended the Indianapolis 500 earlier this year and found that watching racing again brought some of his enthusiasm back. Asked whether he wished he were driving, he answered: “I want to say no but it definitely made me feel a love for it and for racing, a love for competing.”
Le Mans is where he now points that feeling. A full season still does not appeal to him, Ricciardo said, but a one-off in the 24 Hours does. “A year ago, I would have said I will never put a helmet on again. I’m done. That’s it,” he said. “But there is something there where I’m like, it’d be nice for me to also finish a racing career a bit more on my terms.”
He described the finish he wants. “So to do something that, when I take the helmet off, I’m smiling and happy, and maybe that’s the last bit of closure I need,” he said. Part of the appeal is the shared car, where co-drivers share data and help each other instead of facing each other as rivals. “It would be the form of driving and companionship that I would really enjoy,” he said.
Verstappen is high on his list of co-drivers. “I don’t want to put pressure on him, but obviously Max is a name that would be high on the list,” Ricciardo said. He added: “We talked about Red Bull obviously in 2018 and ‘what if’, and I was trying to get back at the team at the end of my career. So maybe that’s a way that we could, yeah, I say give the people what they want.”
He is wary of forcing a neat ending. “I would love to have a nicer ending but I need to make sure that it’s for the right reasons and I’m not just doing it to create a fairytale and to have the last line in the book that has a smile and not sadness,” he said.
Ricciardo is not the only driver to talk openly about the end of a Red Bull chapter: Sergio Perez calls his final Red Bull months toxic. Time away has given Ricciardo a different view of what he achieved. “I look back now with much more of a smile than I did a couple years ago,” he said. “I’m extremely proud, shocked in many ways that it all happened.” Whether that smile ends up on a Le Mans grid is still open, and he has made clear he will weigh the idea for the right reasons.
