DANIEL RICCIARDO’S Formula One career was blasted as “terrible” by former champ Jacques Villeneuve – or at least, half of it.
The Aussie was ditched by McLaren – and replaced by Oscar Piastri – with a year remaining on his contract last summer and elected to rejoin Red Bull Racing as a third driver for this term.
Daniel Ricciardo endured a difficult 2022 seasonRex
SplashJacques Villeneuve slated Ricciardo’s performances[/caption]
Ricciardo, 34, has won eight races during his time in F1, but has struggled over recent years.
But now he will be hoping to rekindle some of his old magic after Nyck de Vries was released from his AlphaTauri seat after last weekend’s Silverstone.
Despite driving the Red Bull RB19 in the Pirelli tyre tests at the British GP, it was later announced he was returning to AlphaTauri and will be driving alongside Yuki Tsunoda at the upcoming Hungarian GP.
But racing legend Villeneuve, 51, last year blasted Ricciardo, telling F1 TV: “He had two terrible years at Renault and two even more terrible years at McLaren. That’s four years. Almost half of his Formula One career was bad.
“Alpine have no reason to take him, especially when he’s driven there before.
“The modern cars just don’t seem to suit his driving style.
“He was impressive at Red Bull. He showed amazing overtaking manoeuvres. He was ahead of Max at the beginning. But in the end Max started to get a handle on him.
“Then he switched. And after the switch something seems to have happened that he never managed to get a handle on. He never recovered from that.”
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Ricciardo achieved two third-place championship finishes with Red Bull. Since leaving at the end of 2018 has come ninth, fifth and eighth.
Speculation began to mount last year that Ricciardo was contemplating a one-year sabbatical from the sport – but Villeneuve claimed that would have been a bad idea.
He added: “It could make him lazy. You can take a year off if you’re an Alonso, a Schumacher, if you’ve been world champion and won a lot of races, if you know in the paddock that you’ll always be at your best, no matter what season.
“After four bad years, don’t do that. You take what you can get. If you have an offer to drive in Formula One, then you take every cockpit.
“In public you will say you don’t want to drive for one of the back teams, but if that’s the only contract you can get, then you’ll sign it.”
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