Daniel Ricciardo Has Been Quite Critical Of His United States GP Comeback

Posted on October 22, 2023 | by Charley Williams Daniel Ricciardo made his long-awaited re-return this weekend at the United States GP and, despite having only contested two full race weekends before his injury, he’s been very critical of his performance so far this weekend! ????  Quite frankly, if we had broken our hand 8 weeks ago, we would still be wasting our days away on the sofa, getting cups of tea made for us. But, that’s why we’re not F1 drivers. And for Daniel, amazingly, he thinks his hand wasn’t even part of why he’s had such an “underwhelming” weekend so far. Its actually a case of (his words, not ours) “race rust”. Despite Ricciardo qualifying 11th and finished 12th in the sprint at the Circuit of the Americas – his first race since before the summer break in July – he had mixed emotions about his performance. Talking to the media, including The Race, he said: “I don’t like saying it because I’m very experienced but this year not so experienced… but a bit of race rust. “Turn 1, part of me is like ‘I should have seen the inside bottle up a little earlier’ – and I kind of stayed there and a couple of cars went on the outside. Little race reads which I probably missed a little bit. “Through the race I feel like I picked up some lines and made some improvements. Certainly still some things to work on for tomorrow.” When asked to expand on which “little” things he meant, he replied: “It was more the race craft, I put a good move on [Lance] Stroll on the outside of Turn 1 but he got me into Turn 12, I thought I had him covered but I didn’t. “Some things there that I was like ‘I should have made it harder for him’.” After being dropped by McLaren at the end of 2022 and accepting a third driver role at Red Bull for this season, Ricciardo was offered a lifeline to get himself back on the grid and replace a struggling Nyck de Vries from the Hungarian GP onwards. He then only competed in one other full race weekend, at Spa, before the summer break. Once that had concluded and F1 returned, he broke his hand in FP1 in Zandvoort. We may not be the best people to ask, but we think he did a great job!