What has been remarkable through all this has been Ricciardo’s demeanour. This struggle has got to be killing him inside and while going through the pain of that he is having to face questions every two weeks, the same questions, is having to hear about the speculation about who might be lined up to replace him etc. Yet he’s not carrying any outward resentment about it, remains polite and sunny. But don’t ever mistake that not for not caring. He just has a unique way of dealing with it.
It’s easy to imagine that this outwardly cheerful front will be evident if McLaren finally decides that the time has come to negotiate. There will be a core of steel there, just as there is in his competitive make-up, sitting just beneath that sunny exterior. If they want him to go, he probably won’t be going cheaply.
Which would still leave the team with the headache of who to replace him with. Yes IndyCar’s Colton Herta has just tested for the team at Portimao in last year’s car, but that would likely have happened anyway, as part of the team’s TPC programme, just as Pato O’Ward tried out at the Abu Dhabi tests at the end of last year. The recent announcement that current IndyCar champion Alex Palou has signed for McLaren (ostensibly for its Indycar team) for ’23 adds an intriguing side story.
But there’s also Oscar Piastri, Alpine’s hugely-rated reserve driver who has been wasted on the sidelines since winning the F2 championship in his rookie season. Alpine may be tempted to loan him out for a couple of years, taking him back as a fully experienced F1 driver when they have a slot. But it doesn’t yet know if it may need him for next year – as Fernando Alonso has still not agreed terms to extend beyond this year. So McLaren can’t even know if Piastri is on their list of options until Alonso puts pen to paper at Alpine.
The whole situation is a complex Rubik’s Cube, but that complication would fall away if magically we suddenly got the real Daniel Ricciardo back.