F1, Christian Horner open-hearted about Daniel Ricciardo

Christian Horner no-nonsense on Ricciardo’s return to F1

During an episode of the “F1 nation” podcast, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner spoke bluntly about the return to the track of Daniel Ricciardo, who, starting with the Hungarian GP will take the place of Nyck De Vries in Alpha Tauri.

“In the last two years I didn’t recognize the Daniel we were used to, who had grown up with us. He came in and drove the simulator a few days after Abu Dhabi. He was a complete mess and had picked up every bad habit imaginable when working with the previous engineer. Over time we solved the problem and with each session you could see his confidence grow to the point where it reached that of the official drivers. The plan was always to include him in the Silverstone test, which was extremely impressive,” began the British team principal.

“The thing that impressed me most when I went to follow the test was that, taking into account the fact that he hadn’t been in a car for many months, by the third-fourth lap he was down to a time that was less than a second off that of our drivers. In addition you could see that his confidence was growing with each pass and he was likely to record front row times on the grid. I was glad to see that he was still able to operate at that level. You could almost see the relief in his eyes and almost the easing of the pressure on his shoulders and that he was still able to run at a high level. In addition, his long runs were really impressive and the work he did for Pirelli was absolutely perfect,” added Christian Horner.