Two stunning drives, 5 years apart. Does Ricciardo's past show F1 future?

Five years ago in Mexico when Max Verstappen brought his Red Bull into the collecting area, having just lost out on pole position to team-mate Daniel Ricciardo, he was furious enough to deliberately knock over the P2 bollard. He’d led the way all weekend up to this point, Ricciardo seemingly not quite on his pace, but then pulling it out the box at the last moment. Which he’d done before, holding something back and then unleashing it all to blindside Verstappen at the critical moment. As Ricciardo celebrated very ostentatiously in front of the TV cameras, Verstappen seethed all the more. It was the fury of a competitor not programmed to lose. It was one thing to be beaten by a superior Mercedes, as he had been for the last three years, but quite something else to be shaded by your team-mate at a track where the specific conditions made your car the fastest for once.

Ricciardo already knew he was leaving at this point. Despite Dietrich Mateschitz having matched Renault’s £20m offer, something which had caused not a little tension between the owner and his long-time friend Helmut Marko who believed the team didn’t need to be spending megastar money when it already had Verstappen, around whom he believed the team should be centred. But Mateschitz liked Ricciardo. Team boss Christian Horner loved having him there too, could see the value of having a generational talent in one car and an exceptionally good performer in the other. Inevitably those two things would overlap sometimes, like here. And Verstappen would not like it when it happened. He took it personally when Ricciardo’s celebrations were so ostentatious. He believed – probably with some justification – that those celebrations were targeted at him.

Max did not sleep well that night as he tormented himself over how qualifying had played out. “He told me he got three hours sleep,” said Horner the next day. “But he arrived here with a look on his face that convinced me there was only one person who was coming out of those first two turns in the lead.” So it was, Ricciardo generating a little too much wheelspin, Verstappen taking the initiative and puling away to a victory that would have been dominant even if Ricciardo’s engine hadn’t broken late in the race when he was lying second.

If you’d played that 2018 Ricciardo a recording from the 2023 Mexican GP future, he would have found it bewildering. He was back in the Red Bull camp? In the junior team? The one he’d left 10 years earlier? And there was Max, still at Red Bull, winning his 51st grand prix? Surely some glitch in the matrix here. What about the Renault team Ricciardo had left Red Bull for, which he was going to help build into a title-contending team? Oh it’s still here under a different name. It qualified 11th and 15th, finished 10th and 11th. Oh…

So if one could have sat down in 2023 with 2018 Ricciardo and explained how it had all gone for him after turning Red Bull’s offer down, you’d have explained how the Renault remained a car which the Red Bull could lap with the same engine. That he’d been very fast there, blowing away two excellent drivers in Esteban Ocon and Nico Hülkenberg, but how he’d despaired at the team’s lack of progress and transferred to McLaren. How there he’d found a car unusual in its traits which he’d struggled to adapt to and in two seasons had been utterly destroyed by team-mate Lando Norris. Which put him back in the junior Red Bull team he’d left a decade earlier. As a mid-season substitute, trying to convince Red Bull he should be back in the senior team alongside Verstappen.