McLaren’s fun-loving country music fan can be fierce when he has to be
He left Red Bull.
He went to Renault.
He has gone to McLaren.
He’s going to get the victory now.
It’s McLaren and Ricciardo who win the Italian Grand Prix. Lando Norris comes home to make it one-two for the men from Woking.
Most Formula One fans remember the 2021 Italian Grand Prix vividly, the day Daniel Ricciardo snagged his first win since Monaco ’18 with Red Bull—and under his third team in four seasons. It marked McLaren’s first victory since ’12. But what fans will remember most is the Australian’s iconic celebration as the red, green and white confetti floated around the podium.
After spraying Norris, Valterri Bottas and the crowd with Champagne, Ricciardo walked back to the podium, sitting down to pull off his shoe. He shook it out, and as Norris poured Champagne on him, McLaren CEO Zak Brown filled Ricciardo’s shoe with the beverage. Ricciardo showed it to the crowd, patting his chest a few times, before drinking. Ricciardo then yanked off the other shoe, which Brown again filled with bubbly. But instead of chugging it, Ricciardo passed it off to his teammate.
All while keeping his signature smile plastered across his face. But it was a long road for Ricciardo to reach that moment or even the 2022 Australian Grand Prix, one filled with sacrifices. He navigated a mostly normal childhood, jumping feet-first seriously into racing in his mid-teens. He moved halfway across the world to chase the Formula One dream, something that is best described as a traveling circus. He fought to be taken seriously in the pinnacle of motorsports, overcoming misperceptions and false narratives. But one question remains.
Who is Daniel Ricciardo, the Honey Badger?
“Yes, I’m a racecar driver,” he says, “but that doesn’t complete me as an individual.”
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Ricciardo’s parents likely heard him before seeing him on Sundays.
As a young boy, he would dash into his parents’ room in the wee hours of the morning, flipping on the television and plopping down on the edge of the bed to watch the NASCAR and Formula One races.
“Not many other people were watching it because they were just like, ‘It’s cars going around in circles,’” Ricciardo says. “But, I loved kind of the strategy behind it, the tactics—like when a driver would pick their moment. I saw it for a lot of the good things that it is.”
During the era of NASCAR when Ricciardo started watching, one name in particular was dominating the circuit: Dale Earnhardt. He recalls seeing “this bold black car with this big number three on it and this guy with cool shades and the mustache,” zipping around the circuits. Ricciardo thought to himself, All right, this is my guy.
“The pushing, the intimidating, all of this. I was like, ‘Yeah, he’s the coolest villain ever,’” Ricciardo, now 32, says. “I was just massively drawn to him and his aura. I never met him, never saw him live. But, from the other side of the world, I kind of felt what made him who he was.”
Ricciardo almost seemed destined from the beginning of his racing career to show flashes of the Intimidator, though at a first glance it could seem unlikely. When he began racing go-karts at 9 years old, the drivers were given numbers. Ricciardo was assigned the number three. At the time, the house his family lived in was the same number. “I was like, ‘I like this,’” Ricciardo says.
As a kid, Ricciardo remembers thinking that he wanted to be a racecar driver, primarily because it was something he was better at compared to other activities in his life. For example, school.
“When I was in school, like honestly, I didn’t really have any strong, strong passion or any real kind of direction of, O.K., that's what I’m gonna study,” Ricciardo says. “Racing was the only thing that really resonated really strongly with me.”
Ricciardo realized in the last couple years of school that he needed “to start growing up” and that he was not “just a kid anymore.” He says that at the time, he was treating racing “like fun,” more of a hobby than a profession.
“I kind of hit a little bit of a switch, and I think it was the realization of, I’m about to finish school and I still don’t really know what I want to do,” Ricciardo says. “And then I was like, ‘All right, I love racing. I think I’m good enough to at least give it a go. So let's just grow up and go into it.’”
He won a scholarship into the 2006 Formula BMW Asia series, snagging two victories and a pole position to finish his rookie season in third place. He relocated again for the ’07 campaign, contesting Formula Renault 2.0 Italy. And after winning the ’09 Formula Three title, Ricciardo made his F1 testing debut with Red Bull. However, he did not have a full-time F1 season until ’12, when he joined Red Bull’s junior program, then called Toro Rosso.
“Being thrown into the … deep end, you go through more at a young age, and that, I think, shapes a lot of the person you become,” Ricciardo says. “When you’re trying to literally be the best in the world at something, it goes without saying you're always going to have highs and lows.”
There was a narrative floating around during his first few years in Formula One that Ricciardo had to overcome: “He’s the smiling joker, and he’s not really got what it takes to kind of do it, he doesn’t have that killer instinct in him.” Ricciardo recalls how he had to work harder for people to take him seriously with his bubbly personality, leaving it all on the track.
Under Toro Rosso, Ricciardo started punching well above his weight early on, eventually becoming known as an aggressive overtaker.
“I do show emotion. And as much as I smile, when I don’t have a good race or if I’m obviously angry or frustrated, I have the ability to show it,” Ricciardo says. “So I think that also reminds people that, yeah, I’m not just here to be here.”
By 2014, Ricciardo was promoted to the senior Red Bull team, finishing third in the Drivers’ Championship after dominant wins at Montreal, Hungaroring and Spa Francorchamps. His first pole, though, did not come until the Monaco Grand Prix two seasons later. His time at Red Bull featured astronomical highs, such as the ’18 Monaco Grand Prix victory with a car that was losing gears and had failing brakes, but also extreme lows, essentially fighting the comparison to his teammate Max Verstappen.
Ricciardo announced midseason that he was leaving to Renault for 2019, but he had limited success there, prompting a jump to McLaren two years later.
But there’s more to him than what we have seen on the track and on Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive.
“Some people are very surprised when you can actually say that you find just as much happiness doing something else,” Ricciardo says. “They’re like, ‘Oh, racing is the only thing that must make you happy, right?’ Actually, no.”
Austin holds a special place in Ricciardo’s life.
Formula One began racing in the Lone Star state in 2012, Ricciardo’s rookie campaign. Since then, the Aussie has routinely finished well as long as his car has not had any problems, with three top-10 finishes (one being third place).
And although Ricciardo saw success on the track, Texas also introduced him to what is now one of his favorite genres of music: country.
Ricciardo says that live music is “a real happy place” for him, and Austin is filled with it. A country music station was typically playing on the radio each day they drove to the track, and he says, “I kind of forced myself to embrace a little bit of the local spirit, and I genuinely liked it.”
He had listened to it a little bit on and off over the years, but he did not take the plunge into the genre until the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was on his farm in Australia. “I was like, This feels right to listen to country,” he says. “I must have just put a playlist on and then it just I was like, ‘Yeah, how have I not given this much more time?’”
Ricciardo lately has been stuck on “Come Back Down” by Tanner Ursey and Ryan Bingham from the show Yellowstone. He says, “I’m still learning a lot about it, but country, it's quite deep as well lyrically. It's pretty deep storytelling. ... If I go to a concert and see someone perform, that gives me as much satisfaction as what I get driving a race car on a Sunday evening.”
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Most know Ricciardo as the older gent strolling through the paddock (though he jokes that he is really 12 years old, not 32), the goofy individual, the fierce overtaker who is not afraid to drink out of sweaty shoe after a win. Others probably think of that moment in Texas when he drove Earnhardt Sr.'s 1984 Chevrolet Monte Carlo NASCAR stock car, living out his childhood dream.
However, there’s more. Being a racecar driver “doesn’t complete me as an individual,” he says, and he wishes people would ask him more questions about who he is out of the car.
He is a son, brother and proud uncle (emphasis on proud), part of a big Italian family. He says, “I've always just loved hanging around kids and just kind of enjoy that family side of life. And then when my sister had kids, for me to play uncle, that was really cool. I think that's brought us even closer.” That family, and his friends, help keep him grounded. “It’s easy to kind of probably lose your way if you don't have that kind of stability or that network,” he says.
“I'm definitely a glass half full kind of person. I value perspective a lot, and I think perspective can change the way you kind of just go about things and handle life, I guess. I'm someone that always tries to find the positives. And that helps me move forward, whether it's in the sport or just navigating my way through life.”
Sacrifices are a dime in a dozen in sports, a vague phrase that athletes mention when asked about adversity they have faced to reach where they are in that moment of their career.
Ricciardo says that while chasing his dream, he has had to miss birthdays and weddings, push through the loneliness of sitting in an apartment in Italy without much of a social life, and he did not get to see his family for almost 21 months because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is frustrating for him, but he says he knows he is not the only one. However, a quote from UFC’s Dominick Cruz shifted the F1 driver’s viewpoint on sacrifices.
“Someone asked him the question about sacrifices, and he goes, ‘They’re not sacrifices; they’re choices,’” Ricciardo says. “If you think of them as sacrifices, it kind of feels like it’s against your will. At the end of the day, I made a choice to move to Europe. I made a choice to try and chase this life.”
The choices, though, don’t mean that one won’t face bumpy roads. So far this season, Ricciardo missed part of preseason testing after testing positive for COVID-19, and he says he still felt “a bit flat” 10 days later. He went on to finish 14th in the Bahrain Grand Prix and then retired in Saudi Arabia. His home track—Australia—brought some much needed positivity to his season.
Ricciardo said after the race that it had been “probably been four years since I left here in good spirits.” (It had been a two-year hiatus from the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic.) The Aussie started P7 and finished sixth, and teammate Norris crossed the finish line a spot ahead of him, resulting in McLaren’s first double-points result of the season.
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Off-the-track, there has been rumblings of fans commenting about his performances, the state of McLaren and even the latest season of Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive. During season four, a supposed rivalry between the McLaren teammates played out on the screen, which was the foundation of the second episode. Ricciardo’s former teammate, Max Verstappen, spoke out about how Norris was portrayed.
Ricciardo says he learned to deal with the noise from social media, adding that “not everyone will resonate with you. Not everyone will get you, and that’s O.K.”
“You could read like 100 nice things but then you read one mean thing, and that’s the one that’s gonna stand out,” Ricciardo says. “You need to value the people around you.… If it’s a stranger behind a computer, then ultimately, their opinion shouldn’t affect you unless it’s an overwhelming opinion from millions of people.”
As far as Netflix and television, he stands firm on one stance: Be true to yourself and have fun with it. Ricciardo says, “If I remain myself, then it won’t drain me. It won’t take energy away from me, and it’s probably easier to just have more fun with it that way.”
But if ignoring the comments doesn’t seem to work, become a honey badger, an animal who looks cuddly but is fearless and fierce thanks to its tough, thick skin. Take Formula One’s very own Honey Badger’s iconic phrase—“Lick the stamp and send it.”
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