RacingDaniel Ricciardo says he is thankful Racing Bulls and Red Bull called time on his Formula 1 career after the 2024 Singapore Grand Prix, framing his exit as the right ending rather than a slight. With six races left, the team replaced him with Liam Lawson, and Ricciardo says he bears no bitterness about the timing or the decision.
“I probably had done my time,” Daniel Ricciardo said, former F1 driver and Ford Racing ambassador, on a podcast with Ford CEO Jim Farley. “For some reason I lost that little spark,” he said in the same conversation. He added that he is “grateful they made the decision for me,” explaining on the podcast that keeping form had become harder and that seeing drivers like Fernando Alonso perform well into their 40s showed longevity is possible, even if it was not his path.
Ricciardo said on the podcast that he now sees Racing Bulls’ move to put Lawson in the car after Singapore, and to let the New Zealander complete the final six rounds, as a positive step rather than an insult. He described accepting the timing as part of making peace with how his story in F1 wrapped up.
His numbers tell the breadth of that story. Ricciardo started 257 Grands Prix across HRT, Toro Rosso, Red Bull, Renault and McLaren, taking eight wins in total. Seven came with Red Bull from 2014, and one more arrived with McLaren at the 2021 Italian Grand Prix. In that podcast with Farley, he acknowledged his win percentage was modest given the volume of starts, and said he considered himself lucky to have won races at all.
The path to that conclusion ran through every layer of the Red Bull system and beyond. After debuting with HRT, he joined Toro Rosso for 2012 and earned promotion to Red Bull for 2014, where he became a Grand Prix winner. He left Red Bull at the end of 2018 and found competitive flashes at Renault in 2019 and 2020. The McLaren move in 2021 brought that Monza victory but also prolonged struggles to match Lando Norris, and the two sides split at the end of 2022. Ricciardo returned to the Red Bull fold as a reserve before rejoining the grid with AlphaTauri in 2023 to replace Nyck de Vries. He then broke his hand in practice at Zandvoort, which opened the door for Lawson to sub for five races. Ricciardo came back for the rest of 2023 and held the seat into 2024, but Racing Bulls ended his campaign after Singapore and handed Lawson the final six starts.
For Ricciardo, that was the closure he needed. As he put it to Farley on the podcast, the spark had gone, and the call made sense.