Daniel Ricciardo is heading into a landmark 200th Grand Prix this weekend at the Belgium Grand Prix, causing the 32-year-old to reflect on his long career in the sport to date.
“If you’d have told me back at Silverstone in 2011, when I made my debut, that I’d hit 200 Grands Prix, I’d certainly have been very excited about it,” Ricciardo said this week.
Ricciardo made his F1 bow with the now-defunct HRT team before moving to Toro Rosso for the 2012 Australian Grand Prix. Two years later he was promoted to the senior Red Bull race team alongside Sebastian Vettel in place of Mark Webber.
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On his first outing for the team, he finished second on the podium – but was subsequently excluded from the classified results for a fuel irregularity, not unlike the fate recently suffered by his former team mate in Hungary.
“It was definitely, I would say on the surface, more of a wake,” Ricciardo told the In The Fast Lane podcast about his memories of what the feeling had been in the Red Bull garage that day.
“I had a lot of mates there and we’d kind of organised a few drinks in the hotel room,” he continued. “I remember the bathtub was full of ice and drinks. But it wasn’t really the atmosphere to go.
“Internally there was some celebrating inside me, because I knew what I’d achieved on that weekend,” he admitted. “I’d kind of ticked the box to myself that ‘Okay, I can do this, I can race at the front’.”
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Ricciardo said that the team’s sporting director had delivered the bad news about officially losing the podium.
“It was when I got to the room, when everyone was there, that I got the call from Jonathan Wheatley telling me what I knew was coming,” Ricciardo said. “But he confirmed it.
“There was a few hugs and whatever, but it was pretty mellow unfortunately.”
Even so, Ricciardo revealed that Red Bull had still honoured its commitment to pay the young driver a full podium bonus in his pay packet despite the disqualification with the team principal Christian Horner delivering the news.
“What cheered me up is – I’m sure they won’t mind me saying this, actually it puts them in good light – I think the day after, I think it was Christian called me and said, ‘Look, we’ll still pay your podium bonus’.
“That was nice. That softened the blow a little bit. That was like my first real pay cheque in the sport, so I was quite happy.”
Fortunately Ricciardo only had to wait four more races before earning his ‘official’ maiden podium when he was third place in Spain. He went on to clinch the first of seven career wins later that same season in Canada.
However he still didn’t secure his first pole position until 2016, when he finally came out on top in qualifying for the 2016 Monaco Grand Prix.
The win that time went to Lewis Hamilton, but Ricciardo did finally come out on top in the 2018 race, his last win before his subsequent move to Renault at the end of the season.
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